Look for the little stamped number on the back label on your syrup. This is the guide to who made your “Pumpkin Village Foods” maple syrup.

Grade B 123: Green Wind Farm, Fairfield 2011 Barrel 34 and 2012 Barrel 024

Grade A 193: Buck Mountain Maple, Fairfax 2012 Barrel 031
Grade A 283: West View Maples, Fairfield 2013 Barrel 13

Grade A 383:  Green Wind Farm, straight off the rig!  Made and canned at the sugarhouse 3/8/13

Grade A 323:   Green Wind Farm, straight off the rig!  Made and canned at the sugarhouse 3/12

I will continue to make information about your specific jar of syrup available to you carrying forward!

Now we’re wrestling with some of the dried, twisted timbers getting them to lie flat as sills in order to stand a frame at some point in the near future! Wish we’d had fresh straight timbers, and some true tie down bolts in the six inch elevated concrete we added to keep water in the canning area. Next time!

It was a quite poor season for everyone in 2012. We made about 1/2 the crop as 2011. There was a week of almost 80 degree weather in Mid-March that caused the trees to start budding. Once this happens the quality of sap, and thus syrup, declines significantly. As a neighbor said, they shouldn’t call it maple syrup, but syrup from maple trees at that point.

We are not interested in making low quality syrup. Some people continued to collect and process sap, in order to sell it on the bulk market for commercial use at about half the rate paid for quality maple syrup. Beware: I tasted some syrup labeled Grade A Dark Amber in a friends’ fridge that hardly tasted like maple syrup… some of this off flavored stuff is bound to make it into retail packaging.

I’ve been luck enough to be able to select some of the best syrup from a few neighbors. Thanks to the kindness of these producers, letting me pick through their barrels, I can still bring you excellent single-source maple syrup straight from Franklin County, VT to “the city”. Please let me know what you think.

Instead of simply labeling this stuff as Green Wind Farm, the name of the producers will be on the back of the jar. I hope you appreciate this full disclosure. Look for even more full disclosure in the future when you will be able to track the day the syrup was made, the day it was canned, and perhaps even some back story about what was happening at Green Wind Farm the day of production!

Goliath: Chick-fil-A (sold $3.5 BILLION worth of product in 2010)

The Beef: Chick-fil-A claims that a t-shirt maker using the slogan “Eat More Kale” is infringing upon their chicken selling restaurant chain. There are many reasons such shirts, bumperstickers, etc. pose no threat to the Chick-fil-A business.

Read the Burlington Free Press story

My friend Jeff Weinstein set up a petition for Bo here They are only a couple thousand signatures away from the goal of 25,000.

Incidentally, Jeff is also the producer of Two Guys in VT soup. His soup is excellent, with a wonderful dedication to sourcing local ingredients. You can find it at The Greene Grape and The Garden.

Okay, well probably not. There’s certainly a lot of concern about GE foods (GMOs – Genetically Modified Organisms). There has been a big push by food advocates of all kinds to support GE food labeling.

According to a 2010 Thomson Reuters poll, 93 percent of Americans support labeling of foods containing GMOs. Big business, thus government, doesn’t.

LET THE FDA KNOW WHERE YOU STAND WITH two clicks

An additional listing of GE resources can be found here

See some videos

Check out Farm To Consumer Legal Defense Fund, an advocacy group here

We were lucky at Green Wind Farm. We live on a rocky hillside with ledge not to far under the soil in some places so water is accustomed leaving our land to the little brook at the bottom of the hill finding its way quickly into Black Creek then the Mississquoi River which both flood multiple times a year. Our area of the state saw little damage beyond limited access to fields and woods due to wet ground and a little wind damage to trees in the woodlots.

Of all the producers I work with to get quality foods to NYC, it appears that only Catherine of Nitty Gritty had significant adversity to deal with. Closer to home, Catherine was stranded at her daughter’s house in Waitsfield, wisely turning back after attempting to drive south on Rte. 100 to her own home in Rochester. They watched the water in a creek nearby rise to unbelievable heights not knowing what to do if the water kept rising. Luckily it was all okay and 5 days later, emergency crews had worked to restore power and rudimentary road access to Rochester. Additional Nitty Gritty news is according to nephew, David, high winds blew down about 1/2 the corn on their finest cornfield.

The work repairing roads and infrastructure is just progressing well for most towns. Conversations about prudent locations of roads, and repairs are happening all across the state. Some waterways have changed and are likely to stay changed for a long time. Awareness of the tenability of locating infrastructure in many locations is prompting long-range planning. Our governor is talking about preparing for weather changes already upon us from global climate change. We’ll all recover with some hard work and community efforts. Life continues to keep us on our toes.

See some flood pictures

Okay, Okay, due to low interest, due to poor marketing, and also a general lack of time this fall, see posts to follow on sugarhouse remodeling, life with a 5 month old, etc. There will be no demos this fall. Next fall.

I left the picture up there because well, what’s cuter than that. What you don’t like the cluttered desk?? Please feel free to come take some fancy pictures and post them for me… Ha.

We are enamoured, excited, and entrenched. Back when we were young, playing the board game Life, it never seemed that difficult to simply put another peg in the back of the family car and keep on driving. Let’s see how it works out this time!

More Photos

Thanks to all our friends and family for the wonderful support we’ve had so far.

In so many ways the fourth of July reminds me of the challenges of existing in a world so aggressively influenced by United States big business (er, government).

The persistent meddling of the US government into sovereign nations’ private affairs is storied and troubling. The constant war-mongering and resulting profiteering; disgusting. Deciphering the contrast between words and actions of US lawmakers and business leaders with regard to the health and welfare of the working person can be disheartening at best. Even the stickers displayed on the packaging of these jars is misleading. America actually signifies all of North or South America, not simply the United States… but I digress.

The point is, I’m proud to support an American (sic) company. Local should trump all. The jars I fill with pure Vermont maple syrup are made in Muncie, Indiana. Cool.

Do you want to find out more facts about the history of Ball Mason jars and perhaps identify when the special blue tinted jar you’ve got was made? Visit the fresh preserving website and download the pdf titled “Jars of the Past”. They’ve got the entire history of when each design change was made through out the 125 year history of these quality canning jars that are useful for preserving virtually anything!

But back to the point of succession. My sister-in-law was surprised to learn of my leanings. I was surprised to have a “sister-in-law”. But more so, I was surprised she was surprised.

She said, “You could kiss your health care good-bye”. I took this to be a conversational non-starter.

I’m a slow thinker, so I thought. “Well, sure. You can kiss almost everything good-bye as we know it now. Don’t you think the result at the end of all the work to take care of each other would look better than it does now?”

Really, couldn’t we, in Vermont (~675,00 people), do almost everything better than the bloated, misguided national bureaucracy we’ve got now? I won’t bore you with specific examples of bloated or misguided (hint: see warmongering).

For some interesting writings on succession, see Vermont Commons. For some reason, my favorite contributor to their newspaper, the Greenneck, doesn’t put his stuff on the website… but thought provoking site none-the-less.