Welcome to the Toil and Boil Weblog
There are ways that being born in Vermont is akin to winning the lottery. It is a place of natural beauty with cute little villages. The people who live here are generally nice and helpful in times of need. The green mountains, which are some of the oldest in the world, run from north to south through the middle of the state creating all sorts of recreational opportunities. There a pile of lakes with clean water to swim in. I could sit here and list reasons why Vermont is such a wonderful place for quite a while. You would get bored reading them all. The fact is many of these great qualities are not unique to just Vermont or even all of New England for that matter. But there is one thing that is unique to the tiny little state that has 237 towns, 35 villages, 9 cities, 5 unincorporated towns and 4 gores; we make an unbelievable amount of maple syrup.
Family at the sap tank 2021
What does it take to create this product? We are excited to donate some time and energy to create this weblog to share our lives as producers of maple syrup. This weblog we have titled “Toil & Boil”. We will share the work involved and the satisfaction that comes from it. Toil means “to work extremely hard or incessantly” according to the dictionary. The second part of our title, “Boil” refers to the boiling of the tree sap in an evaporator. Boiling is the fun part that all of the toil allows you to enjoy. We want the world and all its inhabitants to have some insight into what it actually takes to produce this delectable modification of tree sap called maple syrup.
“Toil means to work extremely hard or incessantly”
We will author a broad range of interesting, fact driven weblogs. I enjoy writing and the creativity it allows. I hope you find it entertaining, educational and who knows, maybe it will serve as an inspiration to follow your dreams as we have. We are working to break into an industry that is hard to get into. Land is expensive, equipment made entirely from stainless steel is expensive, there is a ton of knowledge required to make syrup and the time required to run tubing to thousands of trees is extensive. A lot can go wrong but we have somehow fought our way into the business of maple sugaring in Vermont.
Oh, I wanted to call it a “weblog” for old times’ sake, at least just for this first one. You way not recognize the term “weblog” as it fell out of use around 1999. After that these informal writings on the internet became known as blogs. Do people still have the attention span to read a blog? I don’t know, but I hope there is a small population out there with a greater than 6 second attention span who can pull it off.
Welcome to our blog and stay tuned for additional entries.
