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Bette’s Blog

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,...

02 February, 2017

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...

01 February, 2017

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...

14 October, 2016

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...

26 February, 2016

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?”...

18 January, 2016

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....

26 February, 2014

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."...

15 February, 2014

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...

13 February, 2014

Laura and I rode along with David when he went off to college in Virginia. We stayed in a motel in Leesburg, and is my habit, I took a walk. There, right under my feet, imbedded in the sidewalk, were quotes such as these, from...

11 November, 2013