2013 Deerfield Valley Blueberry Festival | Mount Snow Valley Vermont

Blueberry Block Party
Credit: Heather Atwell The first thing you should know about these towns, to get a sense of the event itself, is they may be  small in size, but when it comes to community spirit, they are huge. The Blueberry Festival certainly celebrates our favorite blue berry, but it also celebrates the tightly-knit fabric of small rural communities; how they are woven together through events like this one. At the center of the Blueberry Festival is Janet Boyd of Boyd Family Farm in Wilmington. She moved to this area from New Jersey nearly 40 years ago. As fifth generation farmers, she and her husband have continued his family business, now alongside their own kids and friends. The operation has changed greatly since she first started, when they decided to go from an animal- to a horticulture-based farm. As Janet says it, “The only thing that’s the same about our business is the dirt we walk on.” What Janet loves so much about this area is how different it is from so many other parts of the world. Road rage? Not a problem here. For Janet, her home in Vermont is welcoming, soothing, and calm. The landscape during the summer is lush and green with inviting lakes, rivers, brooks and of course mountains. One father from New York who brought his children to her farm this past week to pick blueberries told her afterwards that until that moment at Boyd Farm, he never had the type of experience where he could lay in the grass, shut his eyes, and listen his children run and play in the grass and bushes nearby. Any other public place he’d been, he needed to be plugged in, on alert.