Years ago, after quitting her job as an investment banker, Melanie Considine turned to her true passion: photography. “I was always one of those people with a camera in hand,” she said, and so in her late thirties she left behind the high-stress, high-powered world of finance for art school and the business of art and freelance photography. ... Read more

When Eric and Laura Sorkin got into the maple sugaring business five years ago, they went big. The couple invested $1.4 million in a vacuum pump, reverse-osmosis machine and other equipment and tapped sugar maples across 1000 acres they own in Cambridge and Underhill.

At the time, maple syrup prices were at a record high of around $4 a pound — double where they were a year prior — with a gallon fetching up to $70. The timing seemed perfect.... Read more

Stone by stone, inch by inch, Charley MacMartin is building a wall. It’s a surprisingly simple undertaking. Occasionally he wields a small chisel or hammer, tools crafted in Barre that are almost as local as the stones that MacMartin employs. But more often than not, he forgoes the tools altogether, working by hand to stack the rocks that will cumulatively create a tidy boundary wall at a picturesque Charlotte home.... Read more

On Saturday, LaPlatte River Angus Farm owner Jim Kleptz will travel to the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction to attend a cattle auction. For Kleptz, the semiannual event is the best place to secure the volume of steers he needs to meet the growing demand in Vermont for local beef.

Most of those cattle, which are between six months and a year and a half old, hail from Vermont farms. But others are coming from New York or New Hampshire and will be fattened up — aka “finished” — in Vermont before being slaughtered and sold as “local” meat.... Read more

My biggest kitchen catastrophe to date struck two weeks before my wedding day in 2011. I was elbow-deep in flour and cocoa powder, daydreaming of crafting my own three-tiered cake. At a particularly grim moment — and sporting a nasty burn on my forearm — I drank a glass of wine and ate a fistful of crumpled chocolate cake for dinner. Then I straightened my apron, buckled down and muscled through on my own.... Read more

On a recent Thursday evening in the Burlington High School cafeteria, Burlington School Food Project director Doug Davis stood before a small group of Burmese and Bhutanese families. The New Americans were recent additions to the greater Burlington community; each had been in the country for less than a year and a half, and so Davis was offering a crash course in the American school lunch system.... Read more

Construction is under way at Middlebury College and Norwich University, where students are hammering their way closer to the dream of “net-zero” living. Their challenge? Design and build two 1000-square-foot homes that run entirely on the power of the sun. ... Read more

For years, “Susan” paid $30 a month to insure herself through the Vermont Health Access Plan, or VHAP. She went off the state-run program when she landed a job with health insurance. But she has since left that position for seasonal work without benefits, so she’s applied to get back on the state health care rolls.... Read more

When 13-year-old Adrianna Mitrano told her parents she’d be skipping spring sports in favor of the school play, the announcement came as a relief. No more concussions, Leslie and Scott Mitrano reassured themselves — at least for the time being.... Read more

Nationwide, educators are grappling with one of the biggest challenges to hit schools in decades. Since the 1960s, the difference in test scores between economically privileged and underprivileged students has grown 40 percent. Increasingly, income determines a student’s likelihood of success, more so even than factors such as race.... Read more