Letter to the editor: Keep your lawn friendly to pollinators

Mowing high, set to 5 instead of 3, allows wild plants in pesticide-free mowed areas to thrive under the cutting blade.

A white clapboard church sits on Route 116 in the center of Starksboro village. At the front steps of this Baptist church are two container gardens, now home to pollinator-friendly plants. 

If you’ve passed the flower garden at the Weybridge end of the Pulp Mill Bridge recently, you may have thought it looks unkempt, even dead. Not so, exclaim its gardeners.

“There’s something calming for me about getting my hands in the dirt,” Jenne Morton told me recently.

When Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, Jamila stayed up all night in Bridport, watching the news and talking to her family.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden and family members included one setback — the credibility of vaccinators. As one of the thousands who served in the World Health Organization’s smallpox eradication campaign decades ago, I experienced over and over the resis … (read more)

On March 15, the Peace Corps ordered all volunteers to evacuate as soon as they could find a flight back to the U.S. This included 51 PCVs from Vermont along with over 7,000 others. Federal funding provided evacuation costs, two months of healthcare and a … (read more)