Celebrate Vermont Festival officially announced

After a year’s worth of quiet preparations, the Celebrate Vermont Festival is going public. The four-day festival kicks off with a Noah’s Ark Parade of pets and farm animals through the streets of Stowe Village on Thursday August 23h. The following day, Friday at 10 AM, the gates of the Stowe Events field open to all for the three-day session of Celebrate Vermont Festival, August 24-26, at the Stowe Events Field.
Vermonters and visiting guests from the Northeast and Quebec will sample and celebrate the traditional and emerging harvests of our working landscape ‘ a panoply of food, art, craft and culture that comes from our kitchens, farms, forests and the Vermonters who work in them. For 200 years the working landscape has been the major economic driver in our agriculture, forest products and recreational industries.
The Festival will take place in multiple venues. The Stowe Events Field will be home to The Vermont Marketplace sponsored by Vermont Life Magazine, housing 25 specialty food booths, 50 juried craft booths, 25 juried artist booths, and 25 booths of products exemplifying Vermont excellence. Events there will include tastings and pairings of VT artisan cheeses, beers and spirits and will be sponsored by the VT Culinary Tourism Council’sDig In VTprogram, Vermont Fresh Network, The Vermont Cheese Council, Vermont Brewers Assoc., the Vermont Folklife Center, Vermont Council and other partners.
Under the sponsorship of The Vermont Fresh Network, The Live Kitchen will present three compelling chef demos daily. Topics will range from Wok Cooking from My Garden to Stewing and Braising Grass Fed Beef and Pasture Raised Pork. The Culinary Court includes food booths from around the State serving an infinite variety of delicious food all raised, grown, and processed in Vermont. This waste-free market will offer ready-to-eat-and-drink Vermont meals prepared in a variety of styles, no fast food here. All leftover food will be composted on site and all materials will be recyclable.
The educational components of the Festival will take place in The Chautauqua Tent where acknowledged experts in various aspects of animal husbandry, home gardening, small scale farming, orcharding, domestic energy conservation and generation, beekeeping, composting and woodlot & forest stewardship will hold forth during the festival in interactive sessions.
The forestry, trail maintenance, maple sugaring and logging events and lectures will be divided between the Trapp Family Forest and the Chautauqua Tent.
Evening performances at the Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center (www.sprucepeakarts.org) are being planned. Although the search for a new Director has put performances on a temporary hold, Stowe Mountain is enthusiastically supporting the festival and hopes to commit the theater to hosting Vermont acts each evening of the Festival. The Mountain will offer a farmer’s market and several culinary events during the weekend. Restaurants and inns in and around Stowe will be preparing special menus using the fresh bounty of Vermont farms and will offer special prices for Festival-goers.
On Sunday, Hardwick Beef will be cooking a native grass-fed steer on the site. This is an extraordinary event and will be as fun to watch as it will be delicious to sample.
The Festival has already earned the support of a dozen major sponsors public and private and more are joining to help in the effort.
Bill Schubart and Chuck Lacey of Hardwick Beef will be guests on WCAX’s The :30 on March 21st to kick off the discussion and share with viewers more about the Festival. In a subsequent episode Charley Dooley will appear with ‘celebrity’ craftspeople. Subsequent airings will reveal other exciting components of the event.
www.CelebrateVermontFestival.com