“What’s that?”, a visitor coming into the sugarhouse will often ask. It takes me a minute, I almost ask back, “What’s what?”, and then I realize that they’re wondering about the steady “kaplug, kaplug, kaplug”, that I don’t really notice anymore....
Just down the road from the home farm stands this old barn, used for many years to raise our heifers. They run freely in and out of the bottom of the barn, where there’s a barnyard leading out to a very large pasture, steep and...
Did you know that you can listen to cows chewing their cuds? Did you know that cow’s breath smells a certain way, and did you know that a cow’s tongue is like very coarse sandpaper so it hurts when they lick you? (That layer is...
Creatures of habit. Did you know that cows walk out to pasture on the same path, and back to the barn again at milking time, making a cowpath, soft and dusty for bare feet to follow? With cow plops on it, of course. Did you...
One day in the life of a dairy farm wife in the 1980s, no holds barred, a real look at milk production on a family farm....
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 young enough to be tickled...
One winter when I was milking alone at the lower farm, Bette’s barn, there was no gutter cleaner. A barnfull of Holsteins, plus the ell, a lot of manure and bedding to be shoveled out twice a day. There was a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and...
"Windswept, biting, howling, piercing, the snow, the wind, the cold. I love it! Why in the world? Maybe it started with my Mom. She woke us to slide on the hard, glistening crust, knowing that soon after sunrise it often softened, no longer vast, sweeping expanses over...
Twenty six thousand trees? So many acres of land, steep, ledgy sidehills with magnificent views of the mountains across the valley, new sugarwoods, and old sugarwoods that my Dad was tapping since 1943, miles and miles and miles of walking in the woods. How could...
We Wait All Year for the Sap to Run…and then it Doesn’t! When does the sap run? Early spring, temperatures above freezing in the daytime, below at night, right? Well, sort of… Every sugarmaker looks at the weather forecast, out ten days ahead, planning and working, hustling...