Now that the rains have rolled away, we're left with blinding heat and a surfeit of berries. Well, not strawberries, which suffered through our wet spring and whose season is over anyway. Raspberry and blueberry bushes are drooping with fruit (a picking list is below) — including at Poverty Lane Orchards, which is just down the street from me and where I picked some earlier this week. In a sunny field given over entirely to raspberries, there was fruit in every state of being — hard and coral colored, bright red and sweet, and some berries so dark and ripe that they were melting on the bush. I watched a toddler sit down in he grass and eat his family's entire harvest when they weren't looking. It was a raspberry idyll.

With a pile of berries on my counter, I resolved to bake — never a good idea for me — and tried to decide between a simple French-style tart or the more cake-like English model. I looked in cookbooks, at websites and blogs, and even called a cousin. Since I hate following recipes to the letter — and hence, am an awful baker — I combined the finer points of all of those recipes in my head for (what I thought would be) the perfect raspberry-peach-almond tart. 

I live in a 1790s farmhouse that's been converted into condos, and my neighbors and I are surrounded by the verdant remnants of a working farm. Around this time of year, the disturbed patches in our fields and around the barn burst into a riot of weeds, with stinging nettles among the first to rear their deep-green leaves.

For years, I cursed and spat as I accidentally brushed my legs against these invisibly prickly shrubs or absentmindedly tried to pull one out with my bare hands. During a party a few years ago, the host handed me a bowl of wilted, spindly greens. "Nettles. Try them," he said. Dubious, I picked one up with my fingers and studied it before taking a nibble. Sautéed with garlic and olive oil, these enemies of countless gardening sessions had been transformed into something velvety and almost luscious, their sting magically gone. 

The fields looked different after that. If you've never hunted nettles before (actually, they're not hard to find), these clusters of deep-green leaves have serrated edges and veiny tops, and grow from calf-high shrubs. They're best when they're young and tender, still less than an inch long. You can either don garden gloves to pick them or (as I eventually learned) pluck them directly from above; something about that angle prevents their leaves from gittin' ya with their stinging hairs.

When news of the Boston Marathon bombing began trickling in on Monday afternoon, we were in the throes of production at 7D, unable to really tune into the details. Some people seemed silently rattled and distracted, but it was a distraction we had to push aside while we finished up edits and layout and proofing.

When I began to really tune in a few hours later — ingesting images of smoke and blown-off limbs and blood staining the street — it was haunting and horrible yet hard to tear away. Yeah, bombings happen all over the world, practically every single day, but when random violence strikes a place you know well — such as Boylston Street — the line between normalcy and chaos seems paper thin. 

Like a ton of people, I became a news junkie this week, reading stories about the victims and following the addictive Subreddit devoted to finding the bombers. And on this gorgeous, windy day in Vermont, our neighbors a few hours south woke up to stories of even more violence and an eerie lockdown. 

A quick-moving, early-morning barn fire at Springfield's Cavendish Game Birds has killed 20,000 quail and 30 pigs.

Co-owner Rick Thompson says he was awakened about 5:30 a.m. Wednesday by an alarm indicating a power failure in the hatchery. When he opened the door of the barn to investigate, "There wasn't sound so much as smoke," he says. "Shortly after I got out, the barn just went."

Though the barn — one of three — and silo burned to the ground in an hour, Thompson reckons that it was thick smoke that killed most of the animals, which represented about half of Cavendish's stock and all of its breeding birds.

Several surrounding fire departments responded to the fire, and its cause is still unknown. Thompson says there was propane heat in the barn to keep the animals warm, as well as some shavings on the second floor of the barn that may have exacerbated the flames.

Thompson and his brother, Bill, are lifelong poultry farmers, and it was Bill Thompson who began seriously farming and selling quail from his backyard more than 20 years ago. In 1988, the brothers bought the 75-acre farm that became home to Cavendish Game Farms; they supply thousands of Coturnix quail and their eggs each year to restaurants, food service operators and distributors throughout the Northeast, incuding Black River Produce. The farm's birds have been ubiquitous on Vermont restaurant menus. 

The Berkshire pigs that died in the fire represented a new venture for the company, says Rick Thompson. "Maybe it was a mid-life crisis. We'd been in the bird and quail business for so long that we planned on starting a pasture pork operation to try new things." 

The farm has about a month's supply of birds left, he adds, after which the Thompsons will shut down production to concentrate on rebuilding their breeding stock, egg operation and a new barn. They may be selling birds again by late summer.

"One of the hardest things for us is going to be the down time. We have 15 employees, including my brother and myself," says Thompson. "They're all talented and experienced, and we're hoping we can take care of them as much as possible." 

For now, the staff is concentrating on giving its lost quail and pigs a respectful burial. "We'll gather the animals together and bury them," Thompson says.

All of that quaffing you do at the Vermont Brewers Festival every summer? Well, it has some good karma.

Some of the money raised during last July's shindig just provided a boost to the nascent Vermont hops industry when the Vermont Brewers Association gifted UVM's Vermont Hops Project with enough dosh to buy a key piece of new equipment.

At the Winter Hops Conference — which took place at the Essex Resort & Spa last weekend — Vermont Pub & Brewery's Steve Polewacyk handed over a cool $20,000 to Heather Darby, the UVM agronomy professor and researcher who heads the project.

"It really helps us further our research by being able to make [our hops] measurements at UVM," says Darby, who plans to use the money to purchase an ultraviolet spectrophotometer for measuring the quality of UVM-grown hops.

For nearly three years, Darby and her colleagues have raised and studied hundreds of hops plants on their test plot in Alburgh. To assess the acids in the hops they've grown, they have generally sent each sample out of state at $35 a pop — which adds up to thousands of dollars each year, and occasionally a lost sample. Since those plants are entering their third year of growth, says Darby, the 2013 growing season will be high time to see how the 20 or so varietals fare at full maturity.

First Chick-fil-A, now ConAgra Foods. In the advertisement above, a fad dieter finds her salvation in Healthy Choice's new Greek Frozen Yogurt. "I used to hide a secret stash of kale in there," says a tearful actress, indicating her yoga mat. "Now I use it to do yoga."

But what is played merely for laughs isn't so funny to Bo Muller-Moore. The artist behind the "Eat More Kale" logo is none too pleased about the kale cleanser's T-shirt, which sports the very words that made him famous. Muller-Moore had nothing to do with the shirt, which uses a different font from his iconic bubble letters.

When I visited the pigs at at von Trapp Farmstead for my story in this week's paper about Vermont Whey Fed Pigs, I enjoyed the spectacle of seeing exactly how the Duroc, Old Spot and Tamworth mixed-breeds grow to their 225-pound hanging weight at slaughter.

And to celebrate the fact that we'll be feasting on turkey and not hog this Thanksgiving, I thought I'd share a pair of cute piggy videos.

One of the oinkers' favorites is pizza from Red Hen Baking Co.

Below, here's how the magic happens, as their caretaker, Ignacio Villa, spins their food through the air to them.

Here, a mama, whose piglets were born just days before, enthusiastically recharges with whey left over from the production of the Farmstead's organic Oma cheese. Rolls from Red Hen bob in the liquid. Hopefully, your Thanksgiving dinner has a little more variety, but these pigs are sure to be enjoying their own holiday feast this week!

While a tide of blue helped push Barack Obama into a second term, legalize gay marriage in three states, and green-light recreational marijuana use in a few others, not all election results were cause for Democratic swooning this week.

In California, voters rejected Proposition 37 — a ballot initiative that would have required mandatory labeling of foods that contain genetically-engineered ingredients. The measure, backed by organic farmers, natural food purveyors and people concerned with what they eat, was defeated by a margin of 53 to 47.

The victory for the No-on-37 supporters likely stemmed from their unrelenting media blitz in the state, such as the commercial above — it implies that the bill would financially burden farmers and result in higher food prices.

On Halloween, about 2000 people received an email from the Highfields Center for Composting offering "New Rewards for Highfields' Heat Recovery Kickstarter Project!" The Hardwick nonprofit has been researching ways to better capture the heat generated by decomposing food scraps, and is in the midst of a $40,000 Kickstarter campaign to help fund a research center.

The two images that accompanied the email, though, were startling for some. In one, a smiling woman held up squash to obscure her naked breasts, while straddling a green placard with the word 'Compost' written across it. Another woman lay topless in a pile of dark humus, flinging some up with her left foot. Both models were volunteers for a 2013 'Hot Compost' calendar that Highfields' planned to offer as a reward in its campaign.

But the cheeky photos sparked a small but vocal backlash from customers and others who found the concept offensive and demeaning to women. Under pressure, Highfields scrapped plans for the calendar and offered an apology on its website and Facebook page, in which it called the concept a "mistake" and said it did not reflect Highfields as an organization.

It’s no secret: Vermonters are fanatic about maple syrup. Wedrizzle it over our pancakes and smoked bacon, have it in our creemees andcandy, brew it with our beer; we flavor our lives with this sweet, stickysubstance. 

 The Vermont Agencyof Agriculture, Food and Markets, in partnership with the Vermont SugarmakersAssociation and UVM Extension, will hold three public meetings seeking comments on the proposed changes to the maple grading system.

Currently, the U.S.and Canada are the largest maple-producing countries in the world, and have completely different grading systems. In Vermont, an entirely separate gradingsystem is in place. For example,“Fancy,” “Grade A Dark Amber” and “Grade B” syrup only exist in the GreenMountain State’s markets.

The proposedchanges aim to streamline a variety of grading jargon into a new set ofconsistent international standards. “Vermont fancy” would be replaced with“Grade A Golden Delicate Taste.” The other grades would undergo a transformationas well: