On the Water | By Russell Drumm
Catching Really Big Bass
When the Montauk charter boat Captain Mark returned to Salivar’s Dock on Sunday, Mark Marose, her captain, held up a hook that had been bent by the pull of a large striped bass. “I’m going to have to change hooks,” he said.

Nature Notes | By Larry Penny
Befriending the Beasts
A catbird sings outside my bedroom window in the morning and evening, twice a day. When it isn’t singing it is skulking around in the vegetation that rings the property or washing itself in the birdbath it calls its own under a white pine.

Notes From Madoo | By Robert Dash
Potager
More aesthetically considered and generally more diverse in planting, the potager is as much a food factory as the generally rectangular, long-rowed, vernacular vegetable garden, a no-nonsense, in-and-out, seed-to-harvest manufactury. Both, however, might entail the services of (are you sitting down?) specialists, viz: adepts at pickling, preserving (canning, jam-making, sauce-making, etc.), freezing, storing in bags from rafters, storing in sand in a root cellar, knowledge of which side of the green tomato goes up when wrapped in a newspaper, and is it for a sunny, warm window or a cool, dark closet and I thought we were going to make relish out of them or kosher dills and I prefer mine fried.