Through an odd tradition, most of the time a fluorescent light stays on above the counter at the picture window in my kitchen. At some point in the summer, I finally have to turn the light off--that point is when I wake up in the morning and the counter is totally covered with dead bugs (I have no idea why they die overnight...). The carnage is sad and disgusting. But the bugs are just incredible. In fact, the bugs at our place are just incredible in general. I am certain there are insect species on my kitchen counter that have never been seen by humans before.

No bug, however, has been more fascinating than the one a friend of mine spotted at the New Hampshire Farm Museum last weekend. She was checking out the raised bed herb gardens when she noticed this phenomenal insect. We took several pictures of it and were determined to find someone to ID it for us.

Coincidentally, my friend works in the Natural Resources Department at UNH where there happens to be at least one resident entomologist. I thought sure we would stump him and was busy checking out how to contact the world-famous entomologist, E.O. Wilson, at Harvard when my email dinged with a message from my UNH friend. Dr. Paul C. Johnson immediately ID'd our "endangered species" as a member of the wasp family Ichneumonidae. He described it as "using its long ovipositor [which, on this specimen, was several times longer than you see in the photo] to bore several inches through solid wood to lay its egg in its host, usually the larva of a wood boring beetle."

First off, www.bugguide.net described Ichneumonidae as common insects with a worldwide range. And that there are about 5,000 described species in North America with perhaps as many as 3,000 more undescribed species. Come on. I've never seen one of these insects in all my 52 years. How can this be?

Secondly, it bores "several inches through solid wood" with its long thin "ovipositor"? Holy crap. I can barely do that with a power drill. 

But no, as if that's not enough for this apparent overachiever, it bores through said wood to lay its egg in a host larva? How on earth does it know there is a larva at the spot where it drills through several inches of solid wood? I'm exhausted just thinking about it all. 

And lastly, how can it have to do all this complicated maneuvering to reproduce but still be one of the more common insects in the world?

I have never been a wasp fan, but these guys have even me fascinated. Go bug.

Cheryl Kimball is a freelance writer/editor living on a 90-acre tree farm in Middleton, NH.

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Mount Major is a twenty-minute drive from my home. In the 16 years I have lived here, I have driven by the parking lot for the Mt. Major trails many times but I have never climbed up it. I decided that I was finally going to do that this fall as soon as there was a confluence of a crisp, clear day and a clear schedule. Yesterday was that day (ok, so I simply declared my schedule was clear).

I packed my backpack with a windbreaker, bottle of water, camera, binoculars, an apple, cookies, and dog biscuits (for my dog). As hoped, there were only a few cars in the trailhead parking lot--drive by Mt. Major on a summer day and cars are lined up along the roadside for a couple miles on either side of the parking lot.

 Tex and I started up, taking the Boulder Loop Trail as our "best hikes with dogs: New Hampshire & Vermont" book (Lisa Densmore, Montaineers Books, ISBN 0-89886-988-9) suggested. The only person we saw on the way up was a hiker coming down on a side trail a hundred yards or so to our right. My 3yo pup had never hiked a mountain but he runs with me several times a week so he had the stamina and his long legs propelled him up and over boulders like they weren't even there. He was having a blast. I was impressed with how clean the trails (and the summit) were--very very little trash.

We got to the top and had one moment alone before a couple women appeared from the main trail. The three of us did some picture-taking swapping. Mount Major is known for its scenic payoff compared to its modest short climb. The sweeping view of the Lakes Region on a clear day is stunning. Then a couple lone climbers appeared--one older gentleman who apparantly hikes Mt. Major several times each morning. The other was, we discovered, a neighbor of mine I had never met.

After summit pleasantries and my dog doing his best to beg other people's snacks, Tex and I decided to head down. We met one or two couples and one or two dogs along the main trail. I leashed Tex up when he and a young male black Lab decided that roughhousing on the side of a rather steep rocky cliff seemed exciting. We were winding down a peaceful morning when suddenly the real Mount Major appeared in the form of literally hundreds of schoolchildren on a fall field trip.

They just kept coming and coming and coming. And they all were exceedingly polite and loved my dog, which will put even the Devil himself in my favor. Tex was patted around 350 times. "He's so soft!" "Oh, look a dog, he's so cute!" "I have a dog named Rex!" We stopped and stopped and stopped. Tex's tail wagged and wagged and wagged. Then when we got almost to the parking lot, the next to last person was someone I knew--a teacher who was taking her 5th graders on the hike.

Tex and I climbed into the truck and wound our way out of the now-packed parking lot trying to see past the long line of cars now alongside Route 11. Twenty minutes later we were home. Young Tex plopped on the rug in the sun by the open door. And I got back to the work I had decided had to play second fiddle to a beautiful fall morning in New Hampshire.

Cheryl Kimball is a freelance writer/editor. She lives in Middleton, NH.

Photo of Cheryl Kimball and Tex by an anonymous hiker.

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Every day I am on the lookout for wildlife. And there has been plenty of it lately. Whenever I drive home at dusk or after, I see an adult porcupine saunter up the hill behind the barn. Great,  when the dogs get wind of that, there's a vet bill waiting to happen. When I went to pick some veggies out of the garden the other evening, a young porky was snuffling around in the nice clover patch that surrounds the raised beds.

A deer stands at the top of the hill and watches me feed my horses each evening. Her platter-sized ears have caused me to name her Big Ears. One evening she was even in with the horses grazing alongside them; I half expected her to come up into a pen and stand by one of the grain feeders waiting her meal. A flock of turkeys appears every day in some different place on the property--it is simply astonishing to watch them hoist those large bodies off the ground and fly.

Since spring, whenever I have gotten up in the middle of the night--an event that apparently triggers the "gotta-go" response in one or both of the dogs--there is a fox hanging around at the end of the driveway. She leaves scat in the middle of the driveway and does anything else she can to drive the dogs just nuts. Whenever I think she must have made her den nearby and everyone is gone by now, I spot her lurking across the street reminding me that this land is her land too. 

A week or so ago, I went to throw some hay and do a before-bed barn check. In order to get into the barn I had to wait for a young skunk to decide that running back and forth in front of the barn door was not accomplishing much for either of us. He walked toward me as if to check me out; I don't like to be rude, but I did not stand there and let him sniff my pantleg.

Over the holiday weekend we spent lots of time frolicking on the lake. Just as we were loading the sunfish back onto the trailer, two loons--who we had spotted several hundred feet away across the lake--popped up like messages in bottles right behind the half-submerged trailer. I think they wanted to observe our boat trailering skills. They reminded me of my father, who in his later years used to like to sit in the window and entertain himself by watching the neighbors, who always seemed to be getting into some jam or another. "Look at this, Cheryl," he'd yell "they're going to try it again. This is good." I'm sure these loons have seen some entertaining things.

The picture is one I took last fall when I was kayaking on our lake taking in the peak foliage. The loons had been vocalizing while I paddled, and I had seen them pop up here and there around the lake. Just before I was going to paddle into our beach and take the kayak out, one of the adults and a youngster popped up right beside the boat.

I am always on the lookout for wildlife and it is everywhere--squirrels cross the roads like animated commas, a chipmunk  sits up in the flower urn outside the porch door to get a more commanding view, the white flash of a deer hind end disappears into the woods on a dark night on a dirt road, a hawk checks for a meal from a utility line in Boston's Fenway area, the distinct silhouette of a kingfisher is outlined on the branch overhanging a pond, egrets and herons feed in a roadside swamp outside Concord. I even saw a pileated woodpecker fly down to the shoulder of the road as  I drove by this past spring, a first for me. 

And the wildlife seem to be on the lookout for us too. I think they like to observe us as much as we do them. Maybe ol' Big Ears keeps a Human Life List like I do a Bird Life List. What would that look like?

9/09/2009: Brown-haired female, middle-aged, walking in and out of barn

9/12/2009: Male, moving around unusually early, putting things into car, carrying something which appears to be a travel mug

The older I get the more likely Big Ears'  Human Life List will have the following notation:

12/31/2015: Gray-haired human living in red house seems to have migrated south for winter.

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I've been away. To my millions of readers, I apologize for not blathering on about something or other for the past ten days or so. And while this blog entry may not make it self-evident, I am refreshed and raring to go.

I am also mighty smug about the fact that I missed a whole week of tremendous heat and humidity (although I did hear all about it whenever I called home--thanks Mom).

When "home" is comprised of a bed & breakfast-like atmosphere including 90 acres with a grassy woodland trail to stroll with the dogs, a private beach on a lake just around the corner from which to launch our kayaks, small sailboat, canoe, or rowboat, and a couple horses I can ride anytime I want, going on vacation becomes a questionable activity--when you live in a vacation-like atmosphere, why go away?

Obviously, one reason to go away is simply because it is fun to explore new places. We spent the week in Cape Breton, snacking our way around the Cabot Trail and sitting in lawn chairs at our rented cabin only looking up from a good book when bald eagles, whales, and moose flew, swam, or wandered by--which they did quite regularly.

One thing about traveling that I always like is when you get back and suddenly you notice how often you hear references to the place you went. Like when you buy a new car that you've only ever seen a few of but now that you own one they crowd the highways. Now when I hear something about Acadian culture, I'll know what that means--my mind will wander back to a delicious meat pie dinner in Cheticamp.

A bonus was that I added a bird to my "life list"--a Gannet, which for some reason I thought I would have to travel to the Galapagos to see. When I told a birding friend how excited I was to see a Gannet on my trip, she burst my bubble: "Oh ya, we watch them all the time off the shores of Ogunquit." Ah well, it was still exciting.

But leaving a "farm" for eight days is no small undertaking even if it is not a commercial operation. No matter when you go, there is something that should be being done. Pasture to mow, fence to fix, gardens to tend, crops to harvest. It would be the perfect time to prepare that bed for the future raspberry patch. The list is absolutely endless. And the biggest task of all, perhaps, is finding responsible animal care.

If it were just the dogs, I would stick them in the local kennel and go away without a worry. I always miss them and I know they miss us, but the kennel can be great fun for a few days--all those new dogs to meet and people who just goo over them! But since the farm also is home to  three horses (and only a tw0-horse trailer so moving them for a week is more complicated than it's worth), and a goat, and a couple barn cats, having someone stay at the farm while we are away is the best solution.

I'm lucky to have a couple petsitters I can rely on. I wrote a book about starting a petsitting business once and made sure to put in it all the things that I hope petsitters think about. And mine do. I could feel completely carefree that even during an impressive heat wave, my animals were getting the best of care.

That way I could enjoy a new culture, yummy pastry shops, birdwatching, and relax with a book without worrying about being off the farm. And then I can return "farm fresh!"

 Cheryl Kimball is a freelance writer/editor who lives in Middleton. She is author of several books on horses and other topics.

Photo: Bald eagles hang out in Pleasant Bay, NS, harbor looking for handouts. 

Photo by Cheryl Kimball

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When you own livestock, from May to October in New England if someone says "hay!" you drop everything and get hay. New England is among the worst places in the country to try to be a hay farmer. In order to make hay, you need to string together at least three sunny days, the hotter the better. That alone is a trick in this climate. Then think about this particular summer, and add to those three hot days at least three or four more just to dry the ground (grass does not dry well laying on wet ground and tractors get stuck) and you are looking at a week of hot dry weather. No go.

And if "first cut" is too late, 2nd cut is compromised since once we hit mid September, the days are not long enough to dry the hay properly. If the hay does not dry enough before it is baled you are talking best case moldy hay that horses cannot eat without jeopardizing their health, and worst case the tightly baled moist hay heats up and spontaneously combusts causing barn fires.

Some fields are on high enough land that those three days of hot weather  without the extra ground-drying time can be good enough even if it's been rainy. And such was the case recently when a friend called and said "We're going to bale late this afternoon, you want some?" Drop everything!

Hay is the bane of my existence. I have tried to think of everything to make it simpler--the only thing I have found that would really work is to have no animals that eat hay. I haven't tried that since 1992, but I am thinking of going that route.

I've had it delivered from hay brokers at high cost; sometimes it is good hay, sometimes it is just horrible. I've tried mostly to buy from local farmers, but haying around here is unreliable and I have been "burned" several times with no hay lined up and having to punt last minute. I've thought to buy a hay field but I would then be the one fertilizing it and paying the property taxes and either owning (and maintaining) the equipment or paying someone else to cut and bale it and worrying about the weather and wondering if all is lost and still having to buy hay elsewhere. I've thought about turning our 8-acre parcel across the street from our house into a hay field, but it is currently all trees. For the money it would take to cut, stump, clear, fertilize, and seed it, I could buy other people's hay for ten years.

So now I just get hay where and when I can, at as decent a price as possible. And while I have not yet gone the no-hay-eaters route (not that I could if I wanted to, try even giving away a horse these days), I am in the process of drastically reducing the hay-eating herd. I'm down to one goat and four horses, one of which I hope to have sold by fall (not the goat). And then my barn will accommodate the amount of hay I need for the rest of the year until next cutting--if I can afford it and if they cut it at all!

All I know is if someone says "hay!" I stop typing and....

Cheryl Kimball is a freelance writer who lives in Middleton.

Photo: Collecting bales in Lebanon, ME. Photo by Cheryl Kimball

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Mountain Dew. Vitamin Water. Coca Cola (2). Bud Light. Bud. Red Bull.

No these are not beverages I consumed but these are the beverage containers I saw on the side of the road this morning when I went for a short run. I usually run through our woods but the deer flies have arrived en masse and so I hit the road. I was surprised how many empty containers I saw in just around a mile and a half.

 The trash dropped me back to the mid seventies when I was a budding environmentalist (my graduation speech at Traip Academy on the environment talked about the damage those plastic six-pack holders can cause to unsuspecting wildlife) and advocate of the Maine bottle bill, which was enacted in 1976 and implemented in 1978 (see www.bottlebill.org for the Bottle Bill Resource guide). Once the bottle bill was implemented, anecdotal evidence as I rode horses along the roadways (an increasingly dangerous activity that I do little of these days) was that it did have an impact on diminishing roadside trash.

I don't understand the nature of people who would throw things out their car windows, but I do know that most everyone has more respect for things that have monetary value. So if you can get a nickel back for something, even an empty bottle, you don't toss it out the window on some back road.

And if you would, there is still someone would find it worthwhile to redeem those cans I saw this morning--and they would come along every once in a while and collect them and redeem them. And they wouldn't be littering the roadside.

These weren't bottles I was seeing. I don't know if plastic bottles are redeemable anywhere. Most were cans, which are redeemable in Maine. Not in New Hampshire. New Hampshire has fought hard to avoid something like the bottle bill or anything that would add a cost of even pennies to beverage purchases; opponents claim that a bottle bill would destroy New Hampshire's advantage over surrounding states when it comes to the cost of beverages.  

I'm proud of our Live Free or Die slogan. But it doesn't say Litter Free or Die.

Cheryl Kimball is a writer/editor living in Middleton, New Hampshire.

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Although I am certain a nation exploding fireworks in hundreds of cities and towns all in one 48- to 72-hour period has to have some impact on the atmosphere, I don't have anything against fireworks displays. What can be totally wrong with communities of people gathering together, celebrating, and being happy?

The fireworks display I like the best, however, is the one that happens in our yard each year. Like clockwork, the catalpa tree beside our barn is always in full bloom on the Fourth of July. Each spring it is the slowest tree to leaf out on our property; visitors are always lamenting that it looks like the tree beside the barn is dead. And I tell them not to worry, if they were to come back on July 4th, they would see it in all its splendor with big fat leaves and huge white blossoms.

 We bought our place in 1993 from the estate of a gentleman who had died in his early nineties a couple years before. Harold and his wife had bought the property in the early 60s from Virginia and her husband, who used it as a summer camp in the late 40s and through the 50s. They kept a swatch on the lake and built a camp, which Virginia continued to use into her nineties, driving up from Florida each summer. Virginia stopped driving north just a couple years ago, and we heard she died a couple of weeks ago.

Not long after we bought our place, Harold's nephew, who still lived in town, invited us for good old-fashioned cocktails with Virginia to hear stories about living here. She was charming. One piece of information that she told us was that she was the one who, in 1948, planted the catalpa tree beside the barn. Sixty-one years later the little sapling is taller than the 3-story barn, which must stand at least 40 feet at its peak.

According to Wikipedia, the catalpa is native to North America in a southern and northern species. After the sticky blossoms fall, seed pods grow in long beans dangling from the branches. I do know firsthand that when it is in full bloom--even this year when the rain made the display just a little less glorious than usual--it is beautifully fragrant!

 Despite the fact that in the 16 years we've lived here our catalpa has always fulfulled its Fourth of July promise, catalpas are also known to be shortlived trees. And so this year I plan to collect a few of the seed pods and see if I can plant its successor (maybe a little farther away from the barn...) before Virginia's tree succumbs.

And if I live to be in my 90s maybe I will sit with some young couple who has just purchased this wonderful property and tell them that I planted that tree back in 2009. And then they can spend a couple decades enjoying the natural fireworks that explodes beside the barn every Fourth of July.

 Cheryl Kimball is a freelance writer and editor who lives with her husband and their small menagerie of dogs, horses, a goat and barn cats on a 90-acre tree farm in Middleton, NH. Her books include Mindful Horsemanship, Horse Wise, The Complete Horse, Horse Showing for Kids, and others. She also works parttime for the New Hampshire Farm Museum in Milton.

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My mom and I left her driveway yesterday and I said "at least it's not raining." And around two miles down the road I was turning on the windshield wipers. So at risk of causing more dampness, I'll say it again: Although the sky is grey and the air drapes around me like a washed blanket that was left in the dryer without turning it on, it currently is not raining. Yippee dippy doo.

For farmers, rain is usually good. Crops of all kinds need rain. It is easier to quench those thirsty plants with water from the sky than water from irrigation practices; for the backyard farmer, even reeling out the hose can be cumbersome so rain is welcome. Somebody, however, left the spigot open.

My rural life is impacted by excess rain in several ways. First off, I am constantly wet. My horses live an outdoor life (as, I believe, horses should, which is a topic for another time). They have shelter to get out of the elements if they want to but they are not locked in. To feed the horses, I am mostly outdoors. I don't have good rain gear since everything to do with the barn smells like horse after a while and so good rain gear is too expensive to keep up with. And so my feet get wet, my pants get wet, my shoulders get wet.

It's hard to run in the woods--my feet are soggy and uncomfortable almost from the get-go. I do almost everything else in Muck boots, I suppose I could try running in shorts and Muck boots. The dogs stink like wet dog, surprisingly enough, since they are almost always wet dogs these days.  Mowing is impossible. Ropes for halters and lead ropes are so gummy that once you tie them you had better not want to untie them, they are stuck. Leather horse gear is getting moldy. For that matter, even horse manure is covered in mold.

The plants in the garden are saying, "Wait! What about that big yellow thing that provides warmth and encourages photosynthesis? We're drowning out here!" I saw a corn field yesterday in Kittery that will be lucky to be "ankle high by the 4th of July." 

Hay is going to be impossible this year. The ground needs to dry out before anyone can even cut, since not only will tractors get stuck but laying it on wet ground just means it will go bad before it is even baled. Once the ground dries out, if the fields get cut the grass needs to dry in place for at least three days before baling. And baling needs dry hot weather. This means that it will have to be hot and sunny for around two weeks before a single bale gets moved out of a local field. And this means that first cut will be cut late (good for the wildlife that lives in the fields though!) and 2nd cut will not have  much time to grow before the days are too short to bale. This all means top dollar for hay this year. Again.

And lastly, all this rain means the deer fly population is going to be almost unbearable. I have one horse that can't be ridden in the woods for all of July and into August since the deer flies drive him to distraction--he literally threatens to throw himself on the ground to get away from them. So I either ride around in circles in a ring for 6 weeks or take a riding break just about the time I just got riding again! (Horses in northern New England don't make a lot of sense...)

Ok, so now it's raining again. I'm going to go curl up and read a book. Or spend time looking at the Weather Channel website (www.weatherchannel.com) and wait for the sun to come out so I can write a blog entry complaining about how hot it is.

Cheryl Kimball  is a freelance writer and editor who grew up on the Seacoast and now lives on a 90-acre tree farm in Middleton, New Hampshire. She has written several books on horses, including Mindful Horsemanship, Horse Wise, The Complete Horse, and Horse Showing for Kids. 

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If you have not discovered the Weekly Market Bulletin (https://www.hws.nh.gov/agric/bulletin/index.php)  from the NH Department of Agriculture, Markets, & Food, you are missing out. This little four-page newsletter comes in the mail every Thursday and I drop everything to read it immediately. Oh sure, you can receive it as a digital newsletter but sometimes I just need to read without the hum of electronics in the background.

The Weekly Market Bulletin will tap you into the New Hampshire food and agriculture world in the most basic of ways. Short tips (this issue: preventing barn fires), consumer news, agricultural news, a nice classifieds section (livestock sales, farm equipment, wool & fleeces, trucks, wanted), a note from Lorraine Merrill of the Stuart Farm family in Greenland and our very own Agricultural Commissioner, going prices (strawberries this week), auction results, workshops calendar, and pricing of grain, eggs--whew! What four pages on anything gives you this much information? And over the years the WMB has had an increasingly global perspective (this issue includes a short clip from "Lancaster Farming" on Yubari, Japan, which is apparently Japan's Melon Kingdom).  And I often enjoy the occasional humorous clips poking fun at one farmy thing or another.

Even if you live on no more than a hen's peck for a plot of dirt,  this little journal can connect you to the land in short order. And I am willing to bet you will not only, like me, be looking forward to Thursday's mail with renewed interest but after just a few issues you'll have a chicken or two clucking around the backyard!

And yes, for those of you Seacoasters across the bridges, although Mainers can't place ads, the Weekly Market Bulletin will happily take Maine currency and send the newsletter over the border.

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Over the winter,  a friend turned me on to Through the Grapevine in Eliot (21 Cedar Rd, a frontage road parallel to Rte 236). This caterer/deli/wine shop is a local treasure. Besides having the most awesome salmon-laden sandwich I have ever eaten, every third Thursday from 5 to 7pm they host a wine tasting--June 18th is the next.

After attending a few TTGV wine tastings myself, I mentioned it to a couple friends. Even though these friends were intrigued by wine, they clearly weren't quite sure what a wine tasting was all about. In other words, is it rude to just drink their wine and not buy anything?

"No" is the answer to that question. Of course, the host hopes you will purchase a bottle of something you tasted that you really liked. But if not, they are betting that after a memorable and educational experience, when you are ready to purchase a bottle of wine you will think of them.

For those who would like to become more adventuresome about wine, tastings are like a workshop. Typically a wine distributor provides the wine for the tasting and many times even sends a representative to explain the selections; or the presentation is done by the shop personnel. Through the Grapevine keeps it very informal--you arrive when you can and taste as you are ready. The presenters have not seemed offended by having to repeat their spiel several times over a couple hours as they pour the Malbec to several different groups of people.

The wines at a tasting are usually chosen given some theme--seasonal, holiday, or, if you are tasting at the vintners themselves, their own selection of course. Often there is a white or two, a red or two, a sparkling wine, a dessert wine, and one or two choices more unusual than your typical cabernet or chardonnay--after all, tastings are all about becoming more informed and adventuresome than what you might normally select off the shelf!

Wine tastings are a marketing technique--and a good one at that. What could be better than helping customers and potential customers become more savvy about what you sell? And Through the Grapevine has a nice wine selection that is displayed in an attractive, roomy area that is ripe for browsing and deciding.

 As for the drinking part, tastings are just that--tastes. You sip one wine, rinse your glass or trade for a fresh one, and sip the next. Believe me, it's easy!

You would unlikely consume enough wine at a wine tasting to feel more than slightly tipsy. The wine samples are accompanied by descriptions of the vintner, perhaps some trivia about how they got started in the business, what kind of grapes are used, the process, some definitions explained (oaked, bouquet, legs, that kind of thing). One tasting I went to included a wine that was grown in desert conditions, bringing a whole new flavor to the grapes--something I would never have thought about! So in the future, if I liked that wine (and I did!), I could be on the lookout for wines made from grapes grown in arid climates. Besides climate, also talked about would be soils, bottling,  and corks--traditional wood, plastic, or the new more extensive use of screwtops that are no longer just for those bottles of wine that you might buy with the spare change under your car seat with names you recall from your college days. These informational tidbits are intended to up your current level of connoisseurship.

  And yes, the bottom line is that they are intended to entice you to become a customer--and to get you to refer others to the establishment. In most cases, this enticement is directed not only toward the wine but everything else the shop has to offer. Wine tastings are the ultimate in marketing--it's hard to leave a wine tasting without a warm fuzzy feeling. After such a positive experience--free wine, some cheese and crackers, some knowledge--who wouldn't remember Through the Grapevine when you next need a good wine for a host gift or you need a caterer  or even just a good salmon panini for lunch?

Several other local shops do wine tastings as well. Fiddlehead Farms on the Miracle Mile in Dover advertises wine tastings on many Friday evenings. And there's lots of reasons to stop at Fiddlehead's anyway, so why not on a Friday from 4 to 6:30 to try a couple wines? Flagg Hill Winery in Lee (www.flagghillwinery.com) has a tasting room--and you can arrange group tours/tastings for a fun outing with friends. 

Candia Vineyards (www.candiavineyards.com), a boutique vineyard in southern NH, joined the New Hampshire Farm Museum (where I work part time) last November  for the Museum's annual wine and cheese event. Candia Vineyards owner Bob Dabrowski gave a fun and knowledge-packed talk on winemaking.  As a fundraiser for a nonprofit, there was a cost attached to this wine tasting. However unless it is a fundraiser, most tastings cost nothing.; the establishment hopes you will remember them kindly when in need of what they sell, wine or otherwise.

And besides, wine is fun! A $20-30 bottle of wine wrapped in a handmade wine bag makes a lovely wedding shower, birthday, holiday, thank-you, or general gift of any kind.

So don't be shy about going to tastings. For your own table, wine can be an expensive purchase to experiment with without knowing whether you will like it or not. Tastings can help you learn how to read the label to decide on whether the wine is the type you lean toward. And while many of the wines are not local, much of the other items offered at these shops are locally made with local ingredients.

You can learn about wine in general by reading periodicals like the Wine Spectator (www.winespectator.com). You can certainly learn a lot by patronizing wine-specific shops like Ceres Street Wine Merchants (www.cereswine.com) in Portsmouth or Dover Wine Company on Central Ave (www.doverwine.com --check the site for their tasting schedule) and talking to their proprietors.

But nothing beats attending a wine tasting. It's a great grassroots way to support these local businesses and their extra efforts to distinguish themselves from the big retailers.

Photo:  Grapevines early in the season  (Cheryl Kimball photo)

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