There are few greater joys in Vermont than viewing wildlife from your own home. In the seventies this meant a TV dinner and a date with Marlin Perkins; in the Aughts (2000′s), this meant cozying up with a cup of tea and The Sibley Guide to Birds. But these days, it means something potentially more exciting. Just ask the Governor, who recently encountered a bear at his bird-feeder in his Montpelier backyard.

Within the last several years, the successful re-establishment of several wildlife populations has lead to some great viewing. Eagles and Osprey can be viewed along the lake in many locations in Addison County. In some places, deer and coyote are not uncommon sightings. There have also been increased reported sightings of moose, the monarch of the forest.

The presence of more moose demands greater vigilance from nature lovers and motorists, especially now, when the largest animal in New England is on the move. In Vermont in May and June, moose crave salt and are often seen along the rural highways licking the pavement, where the salt from winter snow removal lingers. Moose are harder to spot on roadways than deer or smaller mammals. Because of their great height, moose stand nearly 7 feet high at the shoulder, their eyes are above the usual beam of a car’s headlights and thus do not reflect them as deer eyes do. Neither do they have a nicely visible white tails.

If you are lucky enough to see a moose in the wild, it will usually be a tranquil scene of a bull or cow browsing on plants in a pond. But if you happen upon a cow with her calf, not unheard of in early summer, exercise extreme caution. Moose mom are fiercely protective of their young  and can run as fast as 35 mph!

The best place to see a moose in Vermont is in your own backyard. But if you are in your car, or at a costume party in New York, take appropriate precautions:

image credits: wikipedia, youtube

A nickel tour of Pinterest will reveal hundreds of images of Secret Gardens. And why not? Few things are more romantic or mysterious. Who can forget Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden?

But the secret is out, here in Addison County! After the early false starts of spring and the unseasonable coolth of April, gardeners in Addison County are starting to crow about their garden plots and the Vermont garden is deepening into a green worthy of the name verd monts.

On the eve of Vermont Green-Up Day, organic gardening has reached an almost fevered pitch: a favorite local nursery, Rocky Dale Gardens in Bristol is publishing weekly guides tailored to our Zone; Vermont Garden Journal is airing weekly broadcasts about everything from pruning lilacs to growing blight-free organic tomatoes, local CSAs are gearing up for early veggies, and a local TV station just produced a program about garden edging. Trees are blossoming and Vermonters are itchin’ to get their hands dirty. Maybe it’s time for you to get the bug, too?

If you have forgotten Burnett’s The Secret Garden, here’s a little synopsis: The book’s heroine, Young Mary Lennox, is orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India and sent to England to live with her widowed uncle in a cold ancestral manor in Yorkshire. She finds a key to an overgrown secret garden, the favorite of her late aunt and locked up since her death. Adventure and self-discovery ensue. And the key ultimately unlocks for Mary and her uncle the healing power of living things.

This little story starts to unveil some of the mysteries gardening holds for so many of us here in Addison County. Crack open this book as you sip tea under a nascent lilac or take a tour of these Vermont Garden homes with me and you’ll start to see what I mean.

image credits: Pinterest, wikipedia

Part of a Vermont Realtor’s job is the accurate portrayal of beautiful properties in the best possible light. We do our work to educate our clients about our state and match their dreams to a location and a mortgage. So my interest in rent-free housing might seem counter intuitive. But the story of a temporary housing initiative in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene does part of my job for me, it paints a clear picture of Vermont as an innovative and altruistic place to live.

Examples of Vermont ingenuity and innovation range from outrageous ice cream flavors to Solar Decathalon winners. Vermont even has a Department of Information and Innovation. According to Senator Leahy “The story of innovation in Vermont is truly the American story… driven by independent inventors and small businesses taking chances on new ideas.”

Check out the arching windows on this wonderful Barre apartment building.

The latest chapter of this American story was coauthored by FEMA and takes place in Barre, Vermont. The Federal Emergency Management Agency usually uses trailers as temporary shelters in the event of natural disasters. But in the case of the devastation caused here in Vermont by Tropical Storm Irene, FEMA found a way more suited to this part of New England: historic buildings. FEMA started a pilot program that renovated an old apartment house and made it available rent-free to Vermonters who lost their homes in the storm. This program is the perfect win-win-win for this part of Vermont: housing for those in need; a boost for Barre; new life for an historic building.

While Tropical Storm Irene destroyed many homes and disrupted many lives and businesses, it also brought out the best in us. Though the storm ripped through the state more than nine months ago, rescue operations are still under way and charitable contributions are still pouring in.

We are Vermont Strong. You can be, too.

From the Grateful Dead in Highgate to the Emerson String Quartet at Shelburne Farms to Grace Potter on Church Street, Vermont is the perfect place for a summer music festival. Once the season hits, you’ll find music bursting all over the place like freed mercury. Picnic blankets spread like dandelions and kids of all ages whip off their shoes to dance in the grass. Every town with a village green becomes the center of the universe.

Ever since Vermont became a state, Vermonters have been gathering in summer at these central locations to enjoy community and music.

The quintessential music festival in Addison County is the Middlebury Festival on The Green. In its 34th year, this festival is a great community highlight of the summer. It lasts for a week (July 8-14) and features world music, jazz, blues, folk, comedy, and magic. The entertainment is always good, but the best part of the event is the audience.

It features Vermonters at their finest: Kids with ice cream cones, couples swaying in the breeze, misty-eyed grandparents, and moonlight in Vermont. You get the picture. This festival is one of the reasons we live here.

Here are some wonderful Middlebury homes within walking distance to the Festival and a little music from Willie Nelson to get you in the mood:

Ella Fitzgerald, by the way, forgot the words to Moonlight in Vermont when she sang it at the Flynn Theater in Burlington years ago. Somehow it didn’t matter. Vermont just has that effect on people.

image credits: festivalonthegreen.com

Monkton Vermont was chartered on June 24th, 1762. There are not many monks here, that we know of, instead the town is named after General Robert Monckton (1726-1782).

A British Army officer and colonial administrator, Monckton’s distinguished military career in Britain, Canada, and North America earned him the appointment in 1761 as Royal Governor of New York. He held the post until 1763, when he went home to Mother England, where he was made Governor of Berwick-on-Tweed in 1765, and Governor of Portsmouth in 1778.

It is not clear how early settlers dropped the ‘C’ in Monkton, but the town’s population growth has been documented (see attached) in the 1881 Gazetteer and Business Directory of Addison County. This document, transcribed by the Monkton Museum and Historical Society, gives you an idea of what life was like in the late 1800′s. It contains juicy vignettes on village life like: how the sale of one hundred axes, valued at £20, made a land purchase possible, and how Quaker was condemned to the pillory for “getting in hay on the Sabbath,” during the punishment his wife sat nearby knitting.

At the time of the charter, Monkton had a population of 63. By the 1790s that population had grown to 449. The population was 1,759 by the 2000 Census. In 2012, Monkton still has a small, tightly knit community of active citizens: the Monkton Community Coffeehouse meets the third Monday of the month at 7 PM at the Firehouse, the town website features upcoming events and topical posts, and there’s a new online town forum (http://monktontalk.org/).

Small and sweet, Monkton is perfectly situated between two of Vermont’s biggest cultural and employment centers: Burlington and Middlebury. More than a bedroom community for bigger towns, Monkton has personality and pride. During town meeting this year, Monkton voters chose a flag to commemorate the town’s 250th anniversary. The town flag, designed by Linda Reynolds, a Mt. Abraham Union High School art teacher who has been teaching for 34 years, will be dedicated this summer.

Any Vermonter lulled into a false sense of Spring by the unseasonably warm weather in March will agree with T.S. Eliot that ‘April is the cruelest month.’ That Vermonter might also agree that this month’s cruelty lead directly to the invention of National Poetry Month.

In New England right about now, we need a little soulful beauty to get us through to a fuller experience of Spring. April is filled with unusual national holidays designed, it seems, to do just that. The 19th is National Garlic Day; the 29th is National Shrimp Scampi Day. The 11th is National Eight-Track Tape Day (by some unfortunate coincidence the 11th is also National Barber Shop Quartet Day). But National Poetry Month comes closest to soothing souls and meeting our Mud Season needs.

To honor National Poetry Month it is appropriate that we look into Addison County homes with libraries. Words, after all, are how we define ourselves here in Vermont (think Robert Frost, Fred Tuttle, Bill Schubart); and libraries are where we interpret some of our definitions.

Below are two Addison County homes with libraries. On the left,  Cottage Style home at 150 Chipman Park in Middlebury; on the right, a passive solar Saltbox design on Dog Team Road in New Haven. Click on images of the houses for full listing details:

Now that we’ve got the proper rooms, let me suggest a poem by Vermont’s Poet Laureate, Sydney Lea (taken from the Poetry Foundation website):

Sydney Lea has taught at Yale University, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, and Wesleyan University. He lives in Vermont, where he was named the state’s 2011 Poet Laureate.

Learn more about Sydney Lea at www.sydneylea.net or www.poetryfoundation.org

The triumphal dive of “Titanic” director James Cameron on earth’s deepest point has done more than inspire copycat dives, it has lead to an earth-shattering discovery right here in Addison County.

What started as a revolutionary collaboration among the American Studies, Molecular Biology, and Theatre Departments at Middlebury College has developed into an incredible voyage of discovery. Inspired by Cameron’s voyage into the Mariana Trench, the Addison Aquatic Studies Team launched an expedition to explore, document and film the uncharted depths of three legendary ponds in Addison County, one in Goshen, two in Ripton.

The dives at the Goshen pond, approximately 12.5 acres across, and the upper pond at Ripton, less than 2 acres, revealed only endemic organisms and anticipated environmental characteristics, but the dive at the lower pond on the Ripton property revealed a trench not unlike the Mariana found in the western Pacific.

Though the lower pond at Ripton presented extremely poor underwater visibility, with sub-meter horizontal visibility, divers discovered by feel alone, the trench experts are now calling the Ripton Ditch. Here the Team plunged about two hundred meters to the bottom of the pond in Eastern Addison County, where temperatures are barely above freezing and the pressure is a crushing three times that found at sea level. Speaking after the mission, the filmmaker-explorers described a barren “completely alien world” on the pond floor, not unlike the surface of the moon.

The discovery of the Ripton Ditch, the deepest underwater pond trench in this part of New England, is a pioneering coup for the Addison Aquatic Studies Team, the first film and exploration group of its kind at Middlebury. Paul Johnston, National Museum of American History Diver and Curator and Middlebury College graduate calls the find “Spectacular!”

The Middlebury music department joined the team to celebrate the success of the mission. Local Vermont band, Antarctica, performed the following piece:

Please note: No endemic organisms were harmed in the filming of this expedition.

Image credit: http://subseaworldnews.com

The first sap boiling day of the Vermont Maple Season has traditionally been Town Meeting Day. But unlike Town Meeting, whose results can often be predicted by a savvy town clerk, our sugaring season is much harder to pin down. The Vermont Maple season is nothing if not mercurial – both in its unpredictable and volatile nature and in its dependence on the mercury (in the thermometer).

The flow of Maple sap is caused by the pressure difference within the maple tree when the temperatures fluctuate. Night temperatures below freezing and daytime temperatures above freezing create ideal pressure conditions for good sap flow. According to Vtdigger.org, sugar maple trees now release their sap approximately 8.2 days earlier and stop producing usable sap 11.4 days earlier than they did 40 years ago. In some parts of Vermont, maple season started and ended as many as three weeks early this year.

It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. According to Boston.com, the 2011 “U.S. maple production hit an all-time high of 2.79 million gallons, led by Vermont with 1.14 million gallons. Beyond good weather, technology has played a role in the industry’s growth, with vacuum tube systems that pull he sap from trees and new taps with valves designed to prevent sap flowing back into the trees.” This year could be the perfect time to get in on this burgeoning, time-honored New England activity.

On the other hand, Climate Desk, a non-profit organization that explores the human, environmental, economic, and political impact of a climate change, predicts the disappearance of Maple Sugar in this part of the country by the year 2100. Warmer temperatures are causing a gradual northern migration of the sugar maple. Even an old EPA Climate Action Report from 2002 notes that “climate change is likely to cause long-term shifts in forest species, such as sugar maples moving north out of the country.”

This could be the perfect time to get in on the stewardship of this important New England icon: the Sugar Maple….

image credit: glutenfreeforgood.com

The Summer Olympic games in London are less than six months away. For Olympic athletes, the fervor started years and years ago. The rest of us are just starting to think about 2012 in London. It’s several years too late to get into shape to compete this summer, but it is never too late to get into shape. For many Vermonters, swimming is the answer for that bikini body (OK…one-piece body). And while the Lake thaws, indoor pools are where it’s at.

There are not many Olympic-sized pools in Vermont, Addison County has a few. Middlebury has two that I know of: the pool at Vermont Sun and the Natatorium at Middlebury College. On the other hand there are many in-ground pools in Addison County. And while it might be too soon to turn on your pool heater and call the cabana boy, it’s a good time to start to think about poolside living.

The Brits have done an amazing job with London’s 2012 Aquatic Centre. The building even looks like a wave:

My favorite in-ground pools in Addison County have a very different feel, but when you’re under water wearing your goggles, you could easily feel like you’re in London!

From left to right: Salisbury, Middlebury, Bristol and Bridport. Click each image for full property listing details.

March is easily the cruelest month in Addison County. The calendar says it’s Spring (the vernal equinox is officially March 20th this year) but the temperature is stuck in winter. This is the month when Vermonters take note of the subtlest changes in season. The days are incrementally longer by a few minutes, the tiniest buds begin to develop. Some lucky homeowners might even catch a glimpse of a nascent snow drop or crocus along a south-facing wall.

Among global climates, Vermont’s is classified as Continental Moist, characterized by warm to cool summers and cold winters (less than 27 degrees Fahrenheit). This climate predominates between 40 and 70 degrees Latitude. Spring in this part of the Continental Moist is often referred to as Mud Season. For Vermonters who frequently travel Addison County’s web of dirt roads during Mud Season, the Come-Along is the tool of choice.

The Come-Along is used to winch your car or jeep out of the ruts caused by melting snow. Attach one end to a sturdy tree trunk and the other to your car frame and crank away. You’ll soon be free – and burn some calories to boot.

While Mud Season, frost heaves and Come-Along brands are popular topics of conversation in Vermont’s more rural outposts, I prefer the sounds of the returning birds.

The robins are usually the first back, but the call of the red-winged blackbird for me is a strongest indication that Spring will not forsake us this year. In honor of these seasonal travelers, I wanted to highlight two Addison County Properties that list birds in their MLS property descriptions: one in Addison, the other in Bristol. Click on the image for full property details.

Historic Vermont Home in Bristol.

Let’s start with Bristol. The MLS description of this historic Vermont home built in 1850 as a Vermont Yankee Magazine charmer.

It is walking distance to the Bristol town green and features Mountain views, perennial beds, oak cabinetry, a walk in pantry, and a claw foot tub. The listing photos include views of wildlife in the back yard: deer, cardinals and indigo bunting!

By contrast, the Addison property on Lake Street is modern and rural. This contemporary-style home, custom-designed and built in 2007, is on 142 acres.The living area is 5361 square feet.

View the lake, mountains and migratory birds through the many windows of this custom-designed Addison Vt Home.

It has glorious views of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks and features wood floors, cathedral ceilings, an open kitchen with granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances, mahogany cabinetry and many, many windows. The property is on the western edge of the Atlantic Flyway – a favored path of migratory waterfowl. In season, you’ll hear geese passing overhead on their way to Canada and the Arctic.

Contact me for more information about these and other Addison County properties. Contact the Otter Creek Audubon Society for more information about the great bird watching you’ll find this spring in Addison County.

image credit: fcps.edu, hardwareaisle.thisoldhouse.com