Some of my most vivid childhood memories involve plopping into that pile of red, yellow and brown fallen leaves neatly gathered into a mound by my dad.  I remember running off the school bus in the golden afternoon sun to roll around in the yard amidst the unforgettable sound of crunching leaves and smell of fall decay.  As carefree kids, we thought little of the hard work the trees were doing to prep for winter, or that our fathers did to keep a neatly managed lawn.   

The buzzing of bees is as much a sound of summer in the North Country as is the drone of cicadas or the nighttime call of frogs. It is, hopefully, a common sound we hear outside during the summer and fall months, but just what kinds of bees are in our gardens and why should we care?

How much are you willing to pay to boil water? I don’t mean to make coffee or cook pasta, but for the heck of it. Would you spend $200 to $600 annually just to let off some steam?

What’s round to oval-shaped, mostly orange, and is a common sight leading up to Halloween? Everyone knows the answer to that: Harmonia axyridis, obviously.

While most plants respond to late summer’s shorter days by starting to wind down their business for the season, goldenrod is a “short-day” plant, the kind that is stimulated to bloom by waning day length. It’s a perennial in the aster family, and is widespread across North America. We have something on the order of 130 species of goldenrod in the genus Solidago.

Probably everyone has a sound they connect with high summer. For me, nothing says “August” like the drone of a cicada, its song a miniature buzz saw that cuts across a hot afternoon, undulating a bit and then dropping off near the end of its arc. Cicadas are stout, ancient-looking bugs with bulgy eyes and clear wings. While the largest species is about three inches long with a seven-inch wingspan, the ones in our neck of the woods range from 1 to 2.5 inches in length with a wingspan of three inches or so.

There’s nothing more frustrating than reaching for your camera when you see something exciting and not being able to capture the shot that you imagined.  Although automatic settings on cameras are getting better and better, there are some situations that can be tricky to capture without making some manual adjustments.  Lighting can make or break a photograph and can be the reason your picture came out too blurry, too dark or washed out.  Si

It has been a busy two days at the Nature Up North teacher workshop.  Twelve educators from across the North Country convened to share our ideas for diverse learning experiences with an emphasis on local, natural features.

By definition, a weed is any plant growing where you don’t want it. To clarify, this holds true only in the garden beds or acreage under your cultivation. “Weeding” flowers in a park planter because they offend your sense of aesthetics is frowned upon.  

When you think about it, trees in our landscape have it pretty rough. They don’t get to choose their neighborhood; good, bad or indifferent. Depending where they’re planted they may have to contend with “visits” from territorial dogs, “materials testing” by late-night fraternity mobs, entanglements with errant kites, and other issues.