Daffodil

One of my favorite things about Chesterfield is just up Welcome Hill from the Chesterfield Inn. As you come from Brattleboro, Vermont on Route 9, you’ll come to an intersection where,  if you turn right on Cross Road, you’ll end up at the inn. If you turn left onto Welcome Hill Road, you’ll see the old cemetery, the Burying Ground, dating from 1772, with its weather beaten tombstones still standing in the rocky New Hampshire soil.

Follow the road up the steep hill, until it turns to dirt, and you’ll come to what the locals call The Daffodil Garden. It’s on the right side of the road, and on the side of the hill that slopes down to a wooded stream. The garden is part of someone’s yard, but they’ve been generous enough to notice that people come up the hill just to see the garden, so they’ve made the public welcome. There’s a place to pull over and park your car, and two park benches overlooking the garden, so you can sit and enjoy the flowers. The handwritten sign at the top of the path that leads into the garden says: “Please remember: no dogs, no running children, no picking (of course), open from 9 AM to 8PM.” There’s even a bound guest book to record your name and thoughts, protected from the rain by two metal trays and a rock to keep it all from blowing away.

The garden is a riot of spring flowers, in bright colors: yellow forsythia, yellow and white and orange daffodils, yellow narcissus, white dogwood, and pink azaleas, all connected by a meandering path that winds around the clumps of blooms. I like to come up when I have a minute to myself  and just sit in the  dappled light, letting the colors blur a bit as I listen to the birds sing and bask in our long awaited springtime!

It’s maple sugaring season in New Hampshire, a sure sign that spring is on the way! The weather dictates when sugar season begins, since for the sap to run there must be temperatures above freezing in the daytime and below freezing at night. This New England tradition was begun by the Native Americans, and continues to this day. Sugar houses can be found all over rural New Hampshire, with operations both large and small. New Englanders love their maple syrup, and enjoy it on pancakes, french toast, and ice cream.

When the temperatures are high enough for the frozen sap in the trees to thaw, the sap melts, and pressure builds up in the tree until the sap begins to run. Maple syrup makers tap the trees by drilling holes in them, collect the sap, and boil it down into syrup. Trees are tapped and a bucket set on the trunk of the tree to catch the sap. The farmer then goes from tree to tree in the sugarbush emptying the buckets into a larger bucket to transport back to the sugar house to boil down. (In larger operations, the taps are set up so that the sap runs into tubing that runs between the trees and collects the sap at a central point, saving time and labor).

Once the sap is back transported to the sugar house, it is boiled down over a very hot wood fire, until the water evaporates away and syrup is formed. If you visit a sugar house when they are boiling, when the syrup is finished, they offer around little paper cups of syrup so that you can taste the freshest maple syrup you will ever have. When our children were young, we  visited a sugar house each spring so that they could see the syrup being made and have a taste. Another big treat, called Sugar on Snow,  is to pour the hot maple syrup on packed snow, where it hardens like taffy and you can twirl it up and eat it, followed by a bite of dill pickle to cut the sweetness. Yum! Our local sugarhouses are open and boiling, so come on up and try some!

The maple syrup that we serve at the Inn comes from a local farm in Chesterfield owned by the Mitchell family. Peter Mitchell and his dad make syrup every year, and have it down to a fine science. Bill Mitchell has been making syrup for 70 years, since he was a boy, and it is delicious!