Beat the winter this week!

Here’s a way to beat the winter this week. If you have a big garden, own some woods, grow vegetables and flowers that you sell at a farmers’ market, or just like to garden, then you might want to drop by the 2018 Maine State Agricultural Trades Show in Augusta at the Civic Center starting Tuesday, […]

Start from where you are

The end of another year and I reflect on what we have done this past year, especially what we have done for others. I know one of the greatest gifts we can give our children and those we love and everyone, for that matter, is to leave the Earth as free from our own trash […]

A Maine Christmas the way life used to be

What was Christmas like in Maine years ago when few had electricity?  Were Maine Christmas celebrations different back then? Robert Tristan Coffin, Maine Pulitzer Prize winning poet, looked back on his boyhood Christmases around 1900 when every aunt, uncle, cousin, his brothers and sisters celebrated Christmas at his family’s saltwater Harpswell farm. They cut their […]

A family present for spring, summer and fall

Want an offbeat gift that will make your life and your family’s easier next spring, summer and fall? Then you might want to think about this. If your neighbors use a lawn or garden service, you may want to know what is being sprayed or dumped on their lawns and gardens and when that’s going […]

When a super moon is really super

Tomorrow at 3:45 am you can see the latest ‘super moon’, although it rises here at 4:38 pm this afternoon and will be full. I had never heard the term, ‘Super Moon’, until a few years ago, maybe that’s because it comes from astrology. A super moon appears only 10-14% larger than your usual full […]

Fun to use, but deafening and polluting

It’s as if they’ve never left. That’s because they haven’t. Beginning in the spring during what the lawn and garden services call ‘spring clean up’; then  week after week through the summer and all day for days during ‘fall clean up’, leaf blowers shatter the stillness. Around here the lawn and garden care workers descend […]

Warmer may not be better…

We hear a lot about climate change these days. Sure, we have had some of the warmest years recently since records were kept, but many don’t care and a few even think climate change is a hoax or fearmongering, though why thousands of scientists would want to perpetrate a hoax or purposely make us afraid […]

Where does it all go?

You probably recycle like most Mainers do. But did you ever wonder where your recycled stuff goes?  Does it just become garbage? Or is it reincarnated as something else? We have more and more plastics in our recycling bin these days – plastics from berry, yogurt, some kinds of milk, cottage cheese, eggs, lettuce containers […]

Why are we still alive?

Why are we still alive? That’s a question my wife and I ask one another when another health crises hits the news. Take the cars we knew growing up. If you are like me, I look back on the cars my family owned with a lot of nostalgia. But these cars had no seat belts; […]