Once in a blue moon
Host Nate Hegyi and producer Felix Poon get ready to go outside and wax poetic about the moon.
The next blue moon isn’t until May 2026, but luckily for you, you won’t have to wait that long to hear the Outside/In team answering listeners’ questions. This time, we’re exploring why blue moons are cool (or even what the heck a blue moon even is) and other seasonably appropriate curiosities.
What’s all the fuss about a blue moon?
Which is a more sustainable choice: real or fake Christmas trees?
Featuring Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Tim Gaudreau, Victoria Meert, and Sujay Kaushal.
Thanks to Outside/In listeners Zoe, Janet, Gio, Alexi, Prudence, Wendy, Mo, and Devon for their questions and contributions.
Producer Marina Henke (in the blue coat) with her family at a Christmas tree farm in Missouri.
SUPPORT
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LINKS
Check out this study on the long-term impacts of leaf litter removal in suburban yards.
Looking for a creative and cute way to keep leaves in your lawn or garden? Consider building a “bug snug.”
Read about the mad dash for salt that rescued the 2014 Sochi Olympics’ ski events (NYTimes).
Learn more about the turn to beet juice and beer-based de-icers to reduce the harm of excess salt to the environment (AP News).
Producer Felix Poon and his mom in front of his family’s fake Christmas tree.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, and Marina Henke.
Edited by Taylor Quimby, Rebecca Lavoie, and Justine Paradis.
Our staff includes Kate Dario.
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Jules Gaia, and Jharee.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: [00:00:02] The sky is so clear. It reminds me almost of when you're in the desert. The sky is just really crisp, and you don't see that much in New England. But it feels like that tonight. It's beautiful. Yeah. Okay, so, Felix, we are at NHPR's holiday party.
Felix Poon: [00:00:19] Yeah, outside. We abandoned the crowd. For a peaceful moment.
Nate Hegyi: [00:00:22] Yes, exactly. Are we just out here for, like, fresh air or what are we doing out here?
Felix Poon: [00:00:25] Well, I wanted to come out here to look at the moon together.
Nate Hegyi: [00:00:29] Oh, well, that's that's very that's very sweet of you.
Felix Poon: [00:00:33] Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: [00:00:34] I think it's a full moon. It looks like a full moon.
Felix Poon: [00:00:36] It's almost full, but it's not quite. Yeah, but does it look special at all to you? Like, I feel like there's always some new name for special moons. Like super blue fragilistic.
Nate Hegyi: [00:00:47] Like there's. I feel like. I feel like there's a lot of stories in the news about moons.
Felix Poon: [00:00:53] Like, is it a blood moon or super moon or blue moon?
Nate Hegyi: [00:00:57] It's a nice moon. It's nice moon. That's what I call it.
Felix Poon: [00:01:00] Do you even know what all those other names mean?
Nate Hegyi: [00:01:03] No, I know The Blue Moon is an Elvis Presley song, and, uh, all the others are really cool names for things I don't understand.
Felix Poon: [00:01:09] Yeah, well, I just recently learned and I think it's really cool. So a blood moon is during a total lunar eclipse, but a little bit of the sunlight bounces off the Earth's atmosphere and casts this red light on the moon. So it's like kind of a red tinted moon. So they call it a blood moon.
Nate Hegyi: [00:01:23] Oh, is it like a harvest moon?
Felix Poon: [00:01:25] A harvest moon is something different. So there's, um, in, uh, indigenous naming conventions, specifically Algonquin tribes. Each full moon of the month has a special name for that month's full moon. So there's one of the months the full moon is called a harvest moon. I forget which one. I think it's it's either September or October. It's called the harvest moon.
Nate Hegyi: [00:01:44] Which would make sense because that's when you harvest.
Felix Poon: [00:01:45] Time, you harvest crops. Um, but yeah, the other cool names for moons. A supermoon is when the moon looks larger because it's at the closest point to us in its orbit around Earth.
Nate Hegyi: [00:01:56] I have seen one of those.
Felix Poon: [00:01:57] And then a blue moon that doesn't really have anything to do with the moon at all. Actually, it's just the second full moon in a calendar month.
Nate Hegyi: [00:02:05] That seems kind of unimpressive. I thought a blue moon would have been something like Moody.
Felix Poon: [00:02:10] Yeah, well, we actually had a listener basically feel the same way, but let me play you the clip.
Zoe: [00:02:16] Hi, my name is Zoe and I'm calling from Washington DC. And my question is why does anybody care about Blue Moon? Why would the second moon in a month? Full moon in a month matter if humans are the ones who made them up? Like, I feel like it gets coverage like a a clip or some other sort of cool astronomical event. And I don't understand why a blue moon is interesting. Um. That's all.
Nate Hegyi: [00:02:45] All right, Zoe, I think I can answer this one for you. Yes. You're right. Uh, blue moon, very boring. But you know what? I'm sure it's just a slow news day, and they had to find something, so, like, uh, let's put it on the 5 o’clock news. There's nothing else going on. That's what I think. That's why I think it gets coverage.
Felix Poon: [00:03:02] Well, I looked into this into the origin of the phrase once in a blue moon, meaning that something is rare and it goes back actually hundreds of years. Oh, like it used to be. Just a phrase people said. Like when pigs fly, for example, when some absurd thing, you know, that never happens. Except, of course, one time it did happen. So in 1883, the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia erupted, and the ash from the volcano blocked the red spectrum of the moonlight. So for a full year all around the world, the moon was actually blue.
Nate Hegyi: [00:03:46] So it used to be literally a blue moon. But then it got this other name which is just like, oh, there's two full moons in one month. How did that happen?
Felix Poon: [00:03:56] Yeah, the origins for that definition aren't super clear. Some say it comes from the 1937 Maine's Farmer's Almanac. Others say it comes from a tradition brought over from Czechoslovakia.
Nate Hegyi: [00:04:08] It's like. It's like when you get three paychecks in a month versus two paychecks.
[MUX IN]
Nate Hegyi: Do you ever. Whoa. And you're like, oh, yeah, I got the extra money. That's cool. Having two moons in one month, I don't know. I think someone was bored.
Felix Poon: [00:04:22] Yeah. So like I was saying before, every month has a special name for that month's full moon. So depending on which month you get a supermoon or a blood moon, you end up with these like really cool combinations, like a super Strawberry Moon or a blood beaver moon. And we're recording this in December. It's just a couple of days away from the cold moon.
Nate Hegyi: [00:04:42] The cold moon. That's very apt because I'm freezing right now.
[MUX SWELL]
This is outside/in. I'm Nate Hegy staring at the moon with producer Felix Poon.
Felix Poon: [00:04:53] And in today's episode, we're waxing poetic about the passage of time and the passage of seasons. We're answering listeners questions about leaving the leaves, what happens to Christmas tree stumps, and what all of that salt from the impending army of deicing trucks does to our environment.
Nate Hegyi: [00:05:09] Felix, you really can't help yourself with the the puns. Waxing poetic. I see that.
Felix Poon: [00:05:14] Yeah, I hear that.
Nate Hegyi: [00:05:16] All right, let's go inside.
Felix Poon: Okay, let's go inside.
Nate Hegyi: My hands are actually literally freezing. Yeah, I should have worn gloves. That was a bad move. A bad move on my part.
[MUX SWELL]
<<PRE-ROLL BREAK>>
New Message
Janet Davidson: Hi I’m Janet Davidson calling from Plymouth New Hampshire. And I just wanted to say in my neighborhood we have racoons, we have skunks. They’re a natural thing that we should embrace.
Yeah we don’t want to be sprayed by a skunk. But, if you don’t disturb it, it’s not gonna spray you.
I tried to tell my cat that it’s not a kitty. And I think he knows now. But, I’ve got the remedy now to take care of him, I’ve got special shampoos.
Love your show. Thank you. Big fan. Bye!
End of recording.
[MUX SWELL AND UNDER]
NH: Okay, we’re back in our recording studios, aka our closets at home, to answer listener questions.
NH: And to introduce this first question, Felix, did you ever jump into leaf piles when you were a kid?
FP: Oh yeah, totally, I loved jumping into leaf piles. It just felt so much fun
That is until like I jumped into a leaf pile and then I saw a spider right by my face.
NH: Oh, no, Nope. I’d be out of that leaf pile so quickly.
FP: You know, our executive producer Taylor Quimby he stopped after he saw ticks. I don’t know if we should put up a disclaimer.
NH: Don’t jump in leaves maybe, I don’t know.
Anyways, our listener, Gio, called from Seattle, Washington to ask what effect all this leaf raking has on nature.
Gio: I was wondering about all the leaves that fall to the ground that we rake and clear from our yard. Does that disrupt the nutrient recycling that would normally occur if we just left the leaves there?
NH: Prod cer Justine Paradis jumped into the proverbial leaf pile to see what she could find.
NH: Here’s Justine.
<<BEGIN 1ST SEGMENT>>
Justine Paradis: There’s an official term for the layer of dead and decomposing leaves that wind up on lawns and forest floor: leaf litter. A term which might suggest that dead leaves are essentially trash, and they belong in the landfill. But our listener is onto something.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe: Indeed… raking of the leaves … disrupts the nutrient cycles and the ecosystems in a major way.
Justine Paradis: This is Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a biogeochemist at the University of California Merced. As trees grow, they draw essential nutrients up from the soil and use them to build biomass like their leaves.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe: These are nutrients that they cannot complete their physiological cycles without things like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium… Many of these essential nutrients … plants can only get them from soil.
Justine Paradis: When those leaves fall, the trees return their nutrients to the soil. Insects and microbes digest and reintegrate them back into the dirt. And then the nutrients are available to be drawn back into the tree, and so on and so on. Because dead leaves are about half carbon – when they decompose, they become what we call “soil carbon.” You can usually tell if dirt has a lot of soil carbon, just by looking at it. It’ll be dark and rich, because it’s really good at holding onto water and nutrients.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe: Soils that have a lot of carbon are like sponges. They allow for more water to be held in soils.
Justine Paradis: But when we rake and bag all our leaves, we’re depriving the soil of the return of those essential nutrients. In the US, the EPA estimates that 35 million tons of grass clippings and fallen leaves are removed annually. Researchers have found that long-term litter removal in suburban yards reduced decomposition rates by 17%, and they held almost a quarter less soil carbon.
Now, leaving all the leaves might not be feasible everywhere, like areas with high wildfire risk. And, leaves left on top of grass don't always decompose quickly, so some folks recommend mulching leaf litter with a lawnmower. But it’s not all or nothing. Maybe you can leave some leaves in a pile in one corner of the yard. Or put them in a compost pile and use them in your garden. You can also explore if your community offers state or municipal composting services, because with those programs, most likely –
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe: it's going to be coming back into the soil somewhere… At least it's not just being left to decompose in a landfill, where it would only contribute to more greenhouse gas release… Soil stores close to about 3000 billion metric tons of carbon… more than the amount of carbon that's stored in all of the world's vegetation plus the atmosphere, combined and twice over. So… any change can have a very important implication for… the world's climate.
Justine Paradis: If you do leave the leaves in your yard, you’ll see benefits over the years. Like leaves create habitat for wildlife and insects. Including a crowd favorite: fireflies.
[MUX TRANSITION]
<<END 1ST SEGMENT>>
NH: Okay so, up next we are talking about Christmas trees. Felix, did you grow up with Christmas trees?
FP: Oh yeah, totally. We had a fake christmas tree, and I actually loved putting it together. I thought it was a lot of fun.
NH: Felix, you know that you can just buy them, and they pop up like an umbrella. Yeah I think that’s what we had. And since then, me and my wife, we always go out and chop down our own Christmas tree. Because we’ve been lucky enough to live near public land, where you can do that. So, I feel like you can cut down a fresh little spruce tree, put it in your house, pretty good.
FP: Yeah, I feel like this conversation might spark like a, a request for a this, that, or the other segment, where we have to answer like: what’s better for the environment fake or real? We’ve gotten that question before.
NH: Oh absolutely, everytime the holidays roll around. I’m like, why didn’t we do the Christmas tree episode. What were we thinking?
FP: Well we could do it now.
NH: Should we do it now?
FP: Yeah I think so.
NH: How about this, let’s take a break, and then, you look into it. Alright, Felix?
FP: Okay
NH: In the meantime, I’m gonna share some recent voice mails we got from you, our listeners.
We heard from Alexi in Minnesota who’s going through our back catalog, and they listened to our very first winter surthrival episode
Alexi: If You Wanna Get Koselig, You have to get…or you gotta Get a Little Friluftsliv, I definitely butchered that pronunciation.
NH: It’s okay Alexi, we butcher it too.
Alexi: I decided that on a lovely little 46 degree day I wanted to setup my hammock and I brought a blanket out and I’m absolutely feeling koselig right now.
NH: And speaking of Friluftsliv, we got a few messages after our latest rendition of that episode “Making the most of ‘stick season’”
Prudence wrote in to share how much she loves Dolly Parton’s I will always love you. Do you love that song? I love that song.
FP: I love that song, yes.
NH: And so she wrote, “That song was my puberty, what-the-hell-are-feelings-and-why-are-they-coursing-through-my-body-with-reckless-abandon song.
NH: And I think we have time for one last listener voicemail and this one is really special. It’s from Wendy in Marshall, North Carolina.
Producer Justine Paradis, she visited the town a month after Hurricane Helene, to tell the story of how the community came together after the flood.
Wendy: My name is Wendy Davis. I live in Marshall. I’m in tears. I just listened to your podcast about us. And I stink at voicemails. And when I moved, my number one fear was that we were going to be seen as a small broken down town. And not understood for what community we had to begin with. And what amazing people we’ve had living here all along that’s made this town so special.
[MUX IN]
And you captured it. And you focused on how incredible it’s been that we’re all working together. And I thank you.
And there’s so many of us here, still working hard. But to hear my friend’s voices, I’m grateful you released it now, and I’m grateful my elders told me they heard your podcast.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
FP: Yeah, thank you so much, Wendy.
NH: If you want to be in touch with us you can send us an email at outsidein@nhpr.org. Or hit us up on social media, we’re at outsideinradio on X, Blue Sky, and Instagram.
Okay, we’ll be right back.
<<MIDROLL BREAK>>
NH: Alright, we’re back, you’re listening to Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi with Felix Poon.
And we were just about to tackle the question of whether it’s more environmental to get a fake, or a real Christmas tree.
FP: Okay.
NH: First off, I wanna make, I wanna make a uh, I’m going to guess. I will buy you a beer the next time I see you. That is my wager. I think it is more environmental to get a real christmas tree. T Yeah, so I looked into this.
FP: Ohhh…that feels counter intuitive right. Because trees are good for the environment. And you’re chopping a tree down.
NH: Yeah, there’s a lot of trees. There’s a ton of trees. Anyways Felix, you looked into this.
FP: Basically, the CO2 emissions from real trees mostly comes from how the tree is disposed of. So if you burn it, then all that CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. If it ends up in landfill then it could end up producing methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
The best method of disposal is to chip them, or compost them, and you know, a lot of municipalities do collect them after Christmas for that very purpose.
NH: Do you know what we did with our tree last year? We gave it to our goats. And our goats ate it. So if you have any goats.
FP: Goats will eat anything, huh? Get some goats.
FP: Okay, so for fake trees, you know, fake trees are made from plastic and metal, and most are shipped from China, so you have emissions from both transportation and production. To make that fake tree worth the initial carbon investment, you have to reuse it for long enough. You know, I’ve seen estimates vary anywhere between 5 years to 20 years. So, depends how long you use it. BUT! You know, I will give one more caveat, one more benefit to real trees is that Christmas tree farms can be good habitat for wildlife, especially birds.
NH: Okay, so essentially, uh it depends. Which means that we both buy each other baby beers? Because we both don’t win?
FP: Yes. Let’s just each buy each other a beer. That sounds great.
NH: Okay, that sounds great. So speaking of christmas trees, this is a good segue into our next listener question, it comes to us from Mo in Epsom, New Hampshire.
Mo: It's the middle of December and I'm driving around seeing lots of Christmas tree sale lots and I started to think about all the Christmas tree farms there are and how all of these Christmas trees have been cut off at the trunk. What happens to all the roots? What happens to all the land that those Christmas trees were on in those tree farms? Do they abandon that property? Or do they replant it? Thank you very much!
NH: So our producer Marina Henke got in the holiday spirit and looked into it.
Here’s Marina.
<<BEGIN 2ND SEGMENT>>
MH: I have to confess, I haven’t considered the humble Christmas tree stump much.
My family cut down our tree every year as a kid. But, once we strapped it to the top of our car and drove away – out of sight out of mind.
But – Americans cut down about 30 million Christmas trees every year, which means… that’s 30 million stumps left in fields all across the country. So, what’s the fate of those fields?
Tim: It’s a really good question, but it also makes me laugh. Can you imagine if we had you know 10 acres of Christmas trees – cut it, “Ope! Move on, that’s it, that field is done.’ One could ever farm. We can barely do it as it is!
Tim Gaudreau runs an organically grown Christmas tree farm in Barnstead, New Hampshire. He mostly grows balsam firs –those are the ones with short, but sorta soft needles with that classic holiday smell
Tim plants in blocks of Christmas trees, laid out in a grid. It takes his balsam firs about 5 and 7 years to reach classic Christmas tree height.
[00:08:21-00:08:30] Tim: Once I open a block of trees up to be harvested, those trees will be cut over a few years before that block actually gets cleared out.
This means that after each season, his fields typically have a combination of stumps and trees that are still growing.
[00:05:28-00:05:40] Tim: So once the season's over, I go out with a chainsaw and I cut all those stumps right to the ground level. And then I leave them there.
He leaves them there. Sometimes the answer really is that simple.
[00:05:42-00:06:04] Tim Gaudreau: And I leave them there for a reason, though… one could go through the effort of pulling the stumps, but that's a lot of work.
It’s not just a way to avoid a farm chore, though. Because as those stumps sit there, they start to decompose.
[00:06:30-00:06:55] Tim: if you went through and started pulling stumps, you're going to pull the soil, and you'll remove that stump, which is biomass, which ultimately contains all this rich nutrient density that will return back to the soil if you give it a chance to decompose.
Once all of a block has been fully cut…
[00:08:41-00:08:47] Tim Gaudreau: Eventually that no longer has trees in it, and I let that block be fallow for a couple few years before I plant back into it.
During that time, Tim plants cover crops – plants that protect and rejuvenate the soil: buckwheat and oats, clover and sunflowers. Meanwhile all those stumps and their roots just keep decomposing. If you’re driving by a fallow field, it might look like it’s been forgotten about…
[00:10:15-00:10:21] Tim Gaudreau: But that is not abandoning, that is a strategy for building soil health.
Not everybody uses this strategy though. Some skip the fallow period, and plant trees right by those old stumps. Tim did told me though, you ask 10 farmers this question and you’ll get 20 different answers. So I decided it was high time I knew what happened to all those Christmas tree stumps I never thought about as a kid. I gave Meerts Christmas Tree farm in Festus, Missouri a call.
MH: What do you do with the stump?
Victoria: The stumps will decay. You can plant a new tree right to the next of the stump.
MH: That’s so cool to think that the Xmas trees that my family cut down are technically still in your soil. [MUX FADES IN AROUND HERE]. The stumps have just decomposed.
[MUX IN]
<<END 2ND SEGMENT>>
FP: I feel like this puts a point under the column for real trees. I don’t know, that sounded very lovely. I think I actually owe you a beer.
NH: I know. I think you do too. I think you do too, Felix.
Alright, we have one final question to answer, and this question is about salt.
It comes from Devon in Wyoming. And Devon used to work at the ski slopes in the summer time. You heard that right, summer time – at Palmer Glacier on Mount Hood, Oregon.
Devon: to keep the surface of the snow cold enough that we could ski on, we would throw bags of salt onto the snow
And I was just thinking, like multiple years in a row, it had to add up. So I was just wondering what kind of impact [00:16:00] that might have had on the surrounding environment
NH: You ended up looking into this question Felix. So take it away.
<<BEGIN 3RD SEGMENT>>
Felix Poon: Americans use a lot of salt – and not just in the kitchen.
If you spend winters in cold parts of the country, you’re probably used to seeing salt on the road to melt ice and snow. In fact 44% of salt consumption in the US is for de-icing roads.
When we add road salt, it lowers the freezing point of water. The idea is to prevent ice from forming in the first place.
When ski resorts sprinkle salt on the slopes – they’re relying on that same chemistry. Except the idea there is to melt the very top layer of wet snow so it can refreeze into a hard, uniform surface that’s better for skiing.
But where does all that salt go?
[00:03:44-00:03:53] Sujay Kaushal: even though we think of it as something that gets dissolved in water and washes away, it actually stays in the environment and sticks around.
Felix Poon: This is Sujay Kaushal (SOO-jay KAW-shuhl), a professor of geology at the University of Maryland.
Sujay says, we tend to overdo it with road salt – using more than we need.
Sujay Kaushal: if you keep applying salt to an area, it's going to eventually build up in the soils and in the groundwater beneath the soils.
And that has impacts on plants and wildlife. For example…
[00:11:25-00:11:44] Sujay Kaushal: they started finding that there were salt tolerant plants that are in roadside wetlands
by highways where they shouldn't be.
Felix Poon: Besides creating opportunities for invasive species to take over, research has found that too much salt can be toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms and plants, and it can mess with the whole food web of an ecosystem.
Salt also causes property damage because it corrodes vehicles as well as roads and bridges.
Plus there’s the impact on human health.
14:10 Sujay Kaushal: it's having a major impact on major drinking water supplies in the United States.
Hypertension is already a concern for many Americans. And now, drinking water supplies are getting saltier – to the point where people can actually taste it.
Sujay Kaushal: there are drinking water treatment plants that on the East coast that do get complaints during the winter months of that, that salty taste actually. So they people do recognize it.
Sujay Kaushal: The problem is, is that when there's kind of a creeping normalcy.
[00:15:38-00:15:49] Sujay Kaushal: It's kind of like a lobster in progressively warmer water.
you know, it's like it's just used to it and it keeps rising.
Elevated salt can even cause heavy metals to leach into drinking water. For example in Flint Michigan, lead leached out of city pipes when they switched to a new water supply that had elevated salt levels… caused by… you guessed it… road salts.
So, with all these environmental and health problems from salting our roads, I asked Sujay if there’s anything else we could use instead.
[00:25:58-00:26:12] Sujay Kaushal: there are different alternatives that people have proposed with salt
for example, beet juice based deicers, or cheese brines or, beer maybe.
Felix Poon: But don’t go pouring your leftover lager on the street. The beer deicer is actually an industrial byproduct from brewing beer mixed with salt brine.
But, Sujay says, there are so many roads and parking lots, that no matter what we use, it’s gonna have an effect on the environment… like toxic algae blooms for example.
Plus, in places that have tried out beet juice based deicers, some residents complain about the smell.
So, the best way forward, according to Sujay, is to be strategic with salt, and just use less of it – both on our ski slopes and on our roads.
Road salt only actually does its job when it's dissolved in water – in other words, if you can still see it after you’ve put it down – you’ve probably used too much.
For Outside/In, I’m Felix Poon.
<<END 3RD SEGMENT>>
NH: Uh, you know in Montana, Felix, they don’t use road salt.
FP: What do they use?
NH: They use like gravel and sand. And can I tell you something else about Montana? The roads are terrible in Montana. Absolutely terrible. Mashed potatoes, that’s what you’re driving through.
FP: You know I think we should just stop plowing, stop salting, we should all get onto our cross country skis, and ski around after a snow storm.
NH: We can do that here in our town. Me and my wife, we live in this little town called Jackson, NH where I can literally put on my skis, ski into town. I skied down and I went to this place called J Town deli. And then my wife actually picked me up because I didn’t want to go back up the hill. But, you can do.
FP: You’re halfway there. That’s the solution folks. How to reduce our salt consumption. More skiing.
NH: Just ski around, exactly.
FP: Which brings us back to our original point. Our caller said all these ski slopes are consuming all the salt. So, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. Back to square one.
NH: Alright, that does it for this round of listener questions. For our next round, we’re looking for questions about poison. Venom, platypus spikes, drugs, pollution, snakes, poison ivy, wellness cleanses, bioremediation…
What do you want us to report on?
You can send us your questions by recording yourself on a voice memo, and emailing that to us at outsidein@nhpr.org. Or you can call our hotline, we’re at 844-GO-OTTER.
<<CREDITS>>
NH: This episode was reported and produced by Felix (New Year’s Baby) Poon
FP: Happy new year everyone!
NH: It was also reported and produced by Justine “leave the leaves” Paradis, and Marina “Christmas trees stump” Henke.
It was edited by Taylor Quimby, Rebecca Lavoie, and Justine Paradis.
I’m your host Nate hunter’s moon Hegyi. Our team also includes Kate sturgeon moon Dario.
Taylor Quimby is our executive blue moon producer. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand wolf moon Audio.
NH: Music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions, Jules Gaia, and Jharee. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.