The bees, or yellow jackets, as I found out later, were tangled in my hair and under my shirt and pants, had stung me from the top of my head to my feet where they had wormed themselves under the flap of the only shoe I was wearing. I finally stumbled out of the barn into the yard. My grandfather had grabbed a hand-held insect spray and my grandmother had snatched a fly swatter. I’m sure if I had not been in so much pain I would have found the scene hilarious.

One afternoon the last week of May
Trying to envision a paddock for heifers,
A mile of fence wire around an acre:
I remember the Atwood’s empty pasture:
Tilted posts and rusty wire
And I fetch a bucket, hammer and chunk of wood.

Debbie Apple still remembers the day in 1993 when her 2 year-old son, Brayden, was crawling around in her garden. She looked up in time to see him pluck a strawberry off the plant and pop it into his mouth. She panicked as she realized she had just spread a pesticide throughout the garden. “I think I had never thought of those things (chemicals) as poisonous before. I always just thought of them as part of the garden … that’s how it had been relayed to me at the co-op,” Debbie says.

What do Daniel Boone, John Jacob Astor, and Aspen Hill Farms, of Boyne City, Michigan have in common? Plenty, it seems. As a youngster, I loved the outdoors, especially trapping and hunting. My knowledge of plants and animals was acquired not only from years of practical experience and observation, but also by reading and studying about the stories of our early frontiersman. It is well known that these adventurers were actively involved in the fur trade. What is generally not known, however, is that they were also buyers and dealers of native medicinal plants.

As “the city of honey,” Sortino has the honor of sponsoring annual festivals, conferences and has a beekeeping museum. The town of 9,200 inhabitants hosts 65,000 tourists every first weekend of October, during its honey festival. There are parades, honoring the beekeeping traditions, honey tasting contests and the baking of customary sweets. There is also an annual conference of the Great Honeys of the Mediterranean, which continues to grow nationally and internationally.

We had lived out on our farm on the Rusk Highway for about three years and in those three years I had watched the chicks hatch, a foal born, and on one Sunday at our regular fried chicken dinner, Daisy, our favorite milk cow delivered early in the side yard right outside the dining room window. Grandma was extremely upset, but Daddy Joe, my grandfather, just smiled and said that Mother Nature must not have any respect for human beings’ meal times.

The Conestoga horse was an early native North American breed of draft horse developed in the early 1700s. It was bred for farm labour and to pull the distinctive Conestoga freight wagon. Unfortunately the breed was absorbed through cross breeding and disappeared.

Poems by Uncle Will Cleek, Todd Davis, David Feela, Paul Hunter, Bob Artley and Chloe Molner

Today, as we dodged the quick-moving thundershower under the protective canopy of tall sugar maples soon to be bathed in the hallowed glow of a double rainbow cresting over the Lowell Mountains, I realized that my partnership with this land and these horses is sacred. I wonder: how I have come to be in this spot, at this time, working the woods on the high ground of Mark Dunbar’s hilltop farm in northern Vermont, calming a willing but nervous team of horses as thunderbolts and lightning rattle the woods all around. How have I learned to be with these horses? I think a decade of spending my daily routine with them is surely not enough. How does knowledge become instinct? How does understanding transcend into immediate, thoughtful and deliberate action?

Now, Jack had reached a place of frustrations in his personal life that eventually led to a divorce and created a lack of direction. When he returned from Korea as a war correspondent, one of his editors, Ninetta Eames, invited him to spend time in the countryside of Glen Ellen to think about his future. Little did Jack London know that when he boarded the passenger train in Oakland and traveled through the Valley of the Moon in Northern California that his life would change in unexpected ways.

Coloring • Going to School or Delivering Milk • Roly-poly Paper Man • Learning to Draw

When I first looked up and noticed the clusters of purplish red berries, I thought, what a magical place, where fruit grows like this by the side of the road so anyone can stop and fill a bucket with sweetness. Then I popped a couple berries in my mouth and dropped my bucket, spitting a wad of pulpy pits at the dirt: my first taste of chokecherries.

The Newfoundland Pony has the components of numerous different strains in its foggy past. Dartmoor and Exmoor Ponies, New Forest and Galloway, Welsh, Connemara and Sable Island.

Portable Forges • Scrapers • Grain Shocker • Weber Wagons

Where have all the bees gone? Many who care deeply are searching. Clues are floating to the surface. I see parallels with the human condition of late. Not to suggest that we live in colonies which are collapsing, but rather that if we did live in colonies or clusters or like-minded swarms we would be better insulated against what seems to be heading our way. We actually live today in a morass of commerce-defined mud which denies us our ability to produce “honey.” We have little or no savings or food put by or fuel stockpiled or seed saved. Many of us live without a support group of family and neighbors ready and anxious to help each other out in times of need. We live day-to-day trusting that what we need will be available and affordable when we need it.

There are a lot of folks who spend many hours thinking about what they want out of their life but, in the past 40 years or so, I have been blessed to have my dream beat me over the head whenever I get off track. My trip, however, has not been a straight road in the fast lane.