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Bette’s Blog

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...

05 February, 2025

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...

30 December, 2024

"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...

10 December, 2024

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...

22 April, 2024

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...

29 February, 2024

Wrested from the woods, came the fields and pastures for the farm. Trees cut, stumps pulled, land plowed and harrowed and seeded. And stone picked! Every time a piece was plowed to reseed, up came stones, and more stones. The family went out in force,...

18 September, 2023

“Did we come in the wrong door?’, visitors sometimes ask, walking in to hear a pump running, and see hot syrup running through a line into the filter press. Or dozens of breakfast boxes on tables, being filled with pancake mix and maple syrup, to...

07 April, 2023

I spread out all the Maple recipes from Mom’s big envelope, and took a trip down Memory Lane this morning. So many suppers around our kitchen table, featuring Coleslaw with Maple Dressing, Sticky Buns, Maple Bran Bread… Entries from Maple contests at the Vermont Farm...

30 January, 2023

I stood still and listened to the Laughing Brook today, and mused for the remainder of my hike about the Old Mother West Wind Stories that I was raised on. Many might recognize the term “Old Man Winter”, and my love of the natural world...

01 February, 2022