WEATHER: It snowed for a week and then the sun came out. The sky today was blue as can be. Even the snow was blue down deep in the holes made by my ski poles. HOW’S IT RUNNING? The trees are buttoned up and have been since March 6th, except for one mild afternoon… Read More
Let The Games Begin
Dear Reader, Out the window on this Monday morning after the final day of the 2018 Olympics, a squirrel sprints across the snow. Old Blue, the 1964 International truck that is not blue but green, rests angled beside the stack of pine chunks harvested from the road the day after the Halloween Wind Storm. Winter… Read More
March, Final Round
EXPECT NOTHING. Unfortunately we can’t resist viewing the NOAA and Weather Underground sites to check the forecast. The Wunderground site displays a graph that illustrates the fluctuations in air temp hour by hour. We get our hopes up for a sap run when we see it freezing by 9pm and climbing to 40F. by 1pm… Read More
Sunday Buds
Maple Open House While people twirled sugar-on-snow onto their wooden sticks bit into dill pickles slipped closer to the bonfire sipped sap coffee while chatting with someone they knew from somewhere else, While children slid down the snowbank again and again scrambled back up on all fours rubbed the smoke out of their eyes clung… Read More
To Thrive in the Sugarhouse, Remember a Few Tricks
One of our new crew members, Sarah Bailey, is today’s guest blogger. She writes: Thriving (surviving) in the Sugar House When the weather is right the hard work of the day bleeds well into the night. The wood needs stacking, the filter needs changing and has anyone checked the density lately? If the run lasts… Read More
Blizzard Soup
O happy day, Vermont is in the midst of a blizzard. Stay home, don’t venture out, the newscasters advise. Sit by the woodstove with a neighbor and sip hot soup, I advise. Serendipitously, Maple Trout Lilli stopped by with carrot soup, cashew cream, and croutons. She writes: If you have ever ventured into the world… Read More
Sap’s Running
Here is the long-awaited official confirmation: Sugar Season 2017 at Nebraska Knoll Sugar Farm, Stowe, Vermont began on Saturday, February 18th. What does this mean, sugar season began? It means the maple sap began to flow from the earth up through the roots into the trunk defying gravity up up up to the lacy twigs… Read More
Out with the rusty old, In with the shiny new
Forty years we had the old smoke stack. When Lew and his friend Eric set up a crude sugar shack on Birch Hill in Stowe in the mid-seventies, a friend of Eric’s parents fashioned a stack for them in trade for syrup. It moved with the arch (salvaged forty years ago from a field on… Read More
Blowdown Day in November
Stowe photographer Paul Rogers http://paulrogersphotography.com or INSTAGRAM trekked into the woods in November on a day when the crew cleared fallen trees from the tubing lines. Here are a few of Paul’s photos from that day: Tomorrow the crew will head up for another day of… Read More
Apple Tree in November
WEATHER: Hazy sunshine, high in the 50’s, no wind. Too warm, but good working weather for the woods crew who’ve been busy repairing tubing. Today’s sun reminded me of a journal entry from a year ago, The Year of the Apple Glut. In September, a syrup customer called from out-of-state to ask if she could… Read More
