“Look at this big crack!”, I said to the boys. It extended clear across the pond. “Never come down here without a big person,” I admonished, many times. We scribed out a Fox and Geese pattern while David plowed off a hockey rink. In our attic...
Calling All Vermonters! In conjunction with the Governor’s Tree Tapping, February 28, 2017, at Silloway Maple in Randolph Center, there will be a maple specialty foods contest open to Vermont residents. We hope to see how cooks from all around Vermont use our favorite agricultural product,...
Excerpt from A Farm Wife’s Journal When I was 27, I married a dairy farmer and moved to northern Vermont. Dan leased a farm there, and we lived up back of the barn in a trailer. The winters in Greensboro are cold and snowy, but I was...
A farmer, a maple sugarmaker, a homemaker, a mother…common, ordinary, rather humble job titles to many. Little do they know that I walked to work today (looking over sap lines in the woods), on a royal jeweled carpet. Like a child, I picked up the...
My entire life has been spent in the sugarwoods, one way or another. As a child, riding always on the gathering sled or trailer, hanging on for dear life, mittens soaked with sap slopping up out of the filter, and hours in the sugarhouse while...
I was musing about mowing lawns next summer, then talking about going to the sugarwoods, when Paul, scowling, said,“Why can't you just walk on the road, like the other ladies?”...
Crosslots-itis. A day in the sugarwoods, and I’ve got a case of it. One of the woods stands on a nearly vertical plane, with one main line running up the center, and others coming off it to the sides, horizontally across the mountain....
Tapping in heavy snow. This is a photo of the five-sixteenth line that runs to each tap on each tree. Paul says, "Just before it goes under."...
Welcome to my world…Paul started tapping this morning at 6:00 a.m., with his headlamp, and headed home tonight at 6:00 p.m. That's a day and a half, in the steepest neck of the woods, and snow coming down relentlessly. Mare and I worked together. The...