Crown Maple Farm

Last year, I introduced you to Alan Jennings, an old family friend and avid "birder." Alan and his wife, Denise, had spent a weekend birdwatching and staying at our cabin at Crown Maple Farm. Alan wrote about the experience in a blog post that many of our readers commented on. I invited Alan and Denise to come back this year and here is their report. Enjoy!

Robb and Lydia, in addition to investing in the rural area of Dover Plains, New York, creating jobs and other economic opportunities, have made a commitment to sustainable growth, making top-shelf-quality syrup through organic practices, as well as preserving hundreds of acres of old-growth maple forest. 

And nobody appears to be benefitting more than our fine feathered friends.  If our birds are the proverbial canary in the coal mine, then Dover Plains is doing just fine. 

I was asked to come back to the woods where Crown Maple Syrup begins in order to document the migration of birds moving through those woods. Well, uh, let me think about that. OK, let's see, uh, I'll be there in three hours!

The sap is running early this year and our field teams are working quickly to finish tapping as we enter our second maple syrup production season at Crown Maple Farm.

So far, more than 23,000 taps have been installed and we won’t stop until we reach 30,000 taps in place, making Crown Maple the leading maple syrup producer in New York. While we’re thrilled to have become one of New York’s largest, our primary focus continues to be producing the purest maple syrup on Earth.

It’s been quite an exciting couple of weeks for us here at Crown Maple Farm. First, we were featured on The Martha Stewart Show and this past Monday, it was Woman’s Day Magazine Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Mayhew telling the nation on NBC's Today Show about our pure maple syrup. Pinch me.

Elizabeth called our Dutchess County home “the perfect place weather-wise and climate-wise” for maple syrup and told Ann Curry and the audience about our “100% organic… absolutely delicious” light amber, medium amber and dark amber syrup. She even mentioned how we sustainably manage the farm. She was very kind.

I’m sure you’ve heard by now about the Nor'easter that blew through and buried parts of the mid-Atlantic and New England states under more than two feet of snow – it left millions without power, and we’re no exception here at Crown Maple Farm in Dutchess County, NY where we had a foot of the white stuff. The County has declared a state of emergency, and the governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts have done the same.

Things here are fine, though, all things considered, and we hope all of our neighbors are doing ok as well. The good news is the sugarhouse stayed warm due to the building’s insulation and radiant floor heating and now our back-up generator is running. The bad news is the phones and the Internet are down; if you call today you'll probably get our voice mail, but we're checking constantly. We're also still processing orders for our friends looking to buy pure maple syrup through our online store.

Alan Jennings is an old family friend and an avid "birder." Lydia and I invited Alan and his wife, Denise, up to the cabin for a weekend during prime bird season so they could see for themselves why we love it so much here at Crown Maple Farm. Alan's also a pretty good writer, so I thought you might enjoy reading about his experience...

We're excited to launch our new online home and hope you like it as much as we do.

The site is packed with lots of interesting and useful information. For example:

If you fish, chances are you know that spring is trout season. There are four ponds on Crown Maple Farm, and Robb and our youngest daughter, Ava, like to fish. They usually don’t catch much, but they have a great time anyway. Maddie and I just cook them and eat them. And we all enjoy trout at some of the local restaurants in Millbrook, near Crown Maple Farm in Dutchess County, New York.

Even if you don’t catch your own, trout is an excellent addition to your diet – and it tastes great with Crown Maple Syrup.