When Kathy Petuck joined the Lebanon Garden Club in the late ’80s, she and her husband Clifton Below were the youngsters, and the club had a strong social aspect with monthly meetings and guest speakers. Since the club’s founding in the 1950s, the seasoned gardeners of the time had been enjoying each other’s company around their shared love of gardening. The group planted hundreds of flowers for the many public gardens in Lebanon and West Lebanon.

More than 60 years later, Lebanon Garden Club members are still planting around 600 plants each spring, providing Lebanon residents and visitors with joyful mounds of three-season color.… Read More

If you live in New Hampshire, there’s a good chance you know someone who has been affected by opioid addiction. The opioid crisis has been a long time in the making, and by 2014 Jeff De Flavio, then a medical student at Dartmouth College, had noticed an unsettling trend: despite the prevalence of addiction, treatment providers either weren’t addressing the problem adequately, or their programs were prohibitively expensive, with intake appointments alone costing as much as a thousand dollars. Sometimes, even with the high cost, the programs were full, leaving those struggling with addiction to wait on long lists to receive help.… Read More

The week leading up to Earth Day on April 22 was a challenge for a group of Upper Valley folks who had taken the No Plastic Pollution Challenge – we were committed to not buying plastic. No plastic. Do you have any idea how challenging that can be? Bread bags, cheese wrap, ketchup bottles, yogurt cups, chip bags, cider jugs, peanut butter and mayonnaise jars, take-away cups, frozen food bags, maple syrup jugs, you name it, all soon-to-be-disposed-of plastic.

Two million single-use plastic bags are distributed every minute throughout the world – used for a moment, tossed, and then remain in the environment for centuries as they break down into tiny particles that infiltrate our soils and waters and bodies.… Read More

Many people don’t know there are good jobs in manufacturing, right here, says Chris Hamilton of Fuji Dimatix, which invents and produces commercial-quality inkjet printheads. Kids can buck the trend that says they have to leave the Upper Valley to find a good job after high school. Next fall, a pilot program bearing the impressive name STEM Internship: High Tech Manufacturing and Engineering, will link 16 Lebanon High School seniors and some students from Thetford Academy with Hypertherm and Fuji in a semester-long internship. “The program covers the entire business,” explains Tim Renner, a team leader at Hypertherm’s tech training institute.… Read More