With cold nights (~20 degrees) and warm days (~50 degrees) it’s a great time to be tapping maples for their sap! We have about 10 collection buckets outside Stonehurst Showroom, and on a good day they all fill. If you take a trip through this neck of the woods, you’ll see many of our neighbors doing the same with smaller and larger setups.
Filled buckets are transferred into a 50 gallon drum which sits in the shade of our wood shed. Getting too warm would cause the watery sap to spoil before it’s boiled down into maple syrup. This drum does get hit with about an hour of sun in the late afternoon–oh well 🙂
Once the drum is full, we pump the sap from there into an empty drum on a pickup truck and take it offsite to strain and boil. Boiling temperatures and methods are a science and an art, with lots of folks offering their opinions for what makes the best maple syrup!
Pancake luncheon anyone?
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Sustainable wood sourcing is essential to protecting forests and conserving resources for future generations. Currently, there are five key wood sourcing certification programs that ensure companies use responsible forestry management practices and ethically sourced wood for their furniture and products. By understanding what each designation stands for and how they prioritize sustainability, you can make informed decisions when purchasing ethically sourced furniture.Read More
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At Vermont Woods Studios, we’re champions of the monarch butterfly. We plant trees and milkweed to conserve and restore their habitat. Our customers support our monarch conservation work with every purchase.
Every year American’s spend billions of dollars buying gifts for their friends, family, and loved ones. With the increasing urgency of climate change, we wanted to highlight some businesses that are working to make the world a more sustainable place- businesses that make great products and have sustainable practices baked into everything that they do. There are plenty of amazing companies to choose from that prioritize sustainable material sourcing, ethical production practices, environmental education, and low waste packaging.
While the gift guide below considers all of these factors, it also focuses on sustainable gift ideas that can help people lead more eco-friendly lifestyles.
Much of the food grown in our edible landscape is perennial. We have fruit trees, nut trees, and long-lived and self-seeding greens: sochan, nettle, wood sorrel and lamb’s quarters, to name a few. Once established as part of the landscape, perennials and self-seeders won’t rely (much) on human hands. Convenient! But annual crops are an important part of the landscape, too. Inter-cropping the annuals with the perennials can be beneficial to both.
Preparing the ground for sowing corn
This year I wanted to make a “milpa.” This is a term for the ancient practice of interplanting corn and other plants in a way that benefits the ecosystem. It’s commonly called the “three sisters” although we have more than three sisters, and even a few cousins 🙂 Wild raspberries and strawberries, yarrow and goldenrod for the bees, and many greens, including lamb quarters, lady thumb, and sheep sorrel, all play their parts.
Preparations for cornfield. Photo taken last November
We mow the meadow, so creeping perennials with robust root systems tend to win out. Last November, in order to kill the grass we cut a 30′ x 30′ section as low as possible to the ground, and then mulched heavily with grass clippings, leaves, and wood chips from a hardwood we felled nearby. This worked well to delay the emergence of grass in spring, but it didn’t kill it completely.
One block of emerging popcorn
Later on, loads of compost were added on top to block out sun from the creepers and feed the crops we wanted to encourage. Overplanting, and then thinning, can discourage weeds. It also keeps the ground shady and moist for the young plants.
Knee-high!
Corn needs to be planted in dense blocks to encourage pollination. It emerged after Spring rains–no watering needed. The corn is now in the reproductive stage, with tassels releasing pollen daily and cobs thickening as the kernels develop.
Our meadow “milpa” in late July. Winter squash, beans, nettle, and of course corn.
So far so good! Stay tuned and we will see what we get.
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We’ve had a few customers find us lately, because they’re looking for “responsible furniture”. After thinking about that term, I googled it and not much came up. So I’m taking a shot at breaking it down. Ken and I started Vermont Woods Studios with the goal of serving people who want responsible, eco-friendly, locally crafted, wooden furniture. In that spirit, here’s what I came up with in the who, what, where, when, why and how department of responsibly made furniture.
In this post, we’ll look at the who, what, where, when, why and how of responsibly made furniture.
Small businesses are made of big people like these craftsmen and women at Maple Corner Woodworks. We work to deliver beautiful handmade furniture to your home, but also to make the world a better place.
Yes! All furniture stores should care about endangered species and everyone working at a furniture store should receive training as to why. Your furniture is made with natural resources that are often taken illegally from the habitats of your favorite, iconic animals. Many of them, for example tigers, orangutans and chimpanzees are on the brink of extinction and they need our help. At Vermont Woods Studios, we use only sustainably harvested wood from well managed North American forests. We also plant trees in animal habitats that are suffering from illegal deforestation.
Remembering Those Who Sacrificed Everything for Us
Memorial Day is a time of remembrance, honoring those heroes who gave their lives in service to our country. The simple act of planting a tree can honor their legacy for generations.
These mature maple trees are among hundreds that grace the property where our furniture showroom lives in Southeastern Vermont. Every year at this time, we have thousands of maple seedlings that spring up, hoping to out-compete other plants on the property. This year we decided to nurture some of those seedlings for our customers and our community. We think there are infinite reasons to plant a tree, but Memorial Day seems particularly relevant.
