As a medium-sized maple sugarmaker (our tree farm taps about 2,500 trees), I have mixed feelings about these proposed standards. On the one hand, I'm distrustful of the food safety bureaucracy, as many small farmers are. You need only look at the dairy and meat farming industries - where off the farm sale of raw milk or farmer-processed meat is either intensely regulated or downright illegal - to see how seemingly well intended rules can lead to consolidation that squeezes out the small farmer...

We lost money on sheep this year at our farm. In the grand scheme of things, we're in good company: farmers in New Hampshire and Vermont have been losing money on sheep for going on 180 consecutive years, not counting the bonanza in the early 1860s when the U.S. Army bought a lot of wool at a decent price...

Our friend Dan Wing found this old car out in the woods behind our office. OK, antique car buffs, what is it? We're after make and model, and justify your guesses.
 

Every other week we run a photo of something unusual found in the woods. Guess what it is and you'll be eligible to win a copy of The Outside Story, a paperback collection of our Outside Story newspaper columns. A prize winner will be drawn at random from all the correct entries. The correct answer, and the winner's name, will appear in next week's column. 

Forester and naturalist Lynn Levine snapped this picture last fall. In all, there were about 25 apples in the crooks of trees at different heights - 10 feet in the air, near the ground, and every height in between. "It looked like an Easter egg hunt," she recalls.

She makes a pretty convincing case that she knows whodunit. Do you?

We asked Lynn how she could be sure it was a red squirrel, and she indicated that each apple had clear teeth marks in it. She initially suspected porcupine, but found no sources that indicated that porcupines cache food. Red squirrels do squirrel away food, though. And the teeth on a red squirrel skull she had at home matched the marks on the apples perfectly.

Lynn has a new kids' book out called Snow Secrets - a work of fiction that details the tracking adventures of two six-year-old girls. To learn more about the book, click here.