Maple Syrup Sunday

After tapping the maple trees last weekend, we had to go around each day and empty the sap buckets before they overflowed. Whit built a sled using some old skis and leftover pieces of wood that fit three Polar water cooler bottles, which we used to collect the sap until this weekend when we started boiling it down. Many people have big, nifty drums on horse or ATV-drawn sleds that they use to transport their sap to the sugar house, but since we only put out 16 buckets this year, our small sled is enough. We like the plastic 5-gallon water bottles with their small necks so the sap doesn't splash out as we pull the sled along.

Leaving one of the bottles near the woodstove, we were able to fit the other two water bottles and our grandson, who liked the ride, in the sled. It sure made it easier for him to keep up with us.

He thought the whole collecting process was great entertainment, and he had a front row seat!

After the sap is collected from all the buckets each day, we transfer it from the water bottles into a clean, new 30-gallon trash can so we can fill the bottles with the next day's sap. By the way, the trash can is only used for collecting sap. When the sap season is done, we store the buckets, hats, and taps in it for the next year.

When we're done making the trip around our small "sugar bush," we leave the sled out by the sugar shack for the next day. Well, okay, so the sugar shack isn't built yet... Rome wasn't built in a day either. : )

There was still quite a bit of snow last week, but slowly, steadily, it's been melting.

Maine actually celebrates Maple Sunday, which was this past weekend. It's the day that all the commercial sugar houses around the state invite people to stop by, sample, and buy their syrup. Our storage containers were all full, so we needed to start boiling our sap down into syrup. Like the rest of Maine, it usually turns into a fun social event for us too.

The bottles are emptied into a bucket that sits higher than the evaporator on the woodstove. The sap is gravity-fed into the evaporator.

The boiling process must be constantly supervised to make sure the evaporator doesn't boil dry. Impurities rise up out of the sap as it boils, collecting in sort of a scum on the top, so someone needs to keep skimming that off. TBear is taking a turn at the job here, while his chum watches.


It takes all day to boil the amount of sap we've collected. Whit starts the fire right after chores in the morning. By lunchtime friends have joined us for some home-made soup, fresh bread, and Sunday worship around the evaporator. It really was a wonderful day of rest and fellowship.


Below is the bucket of sap feeding the evaporator on top of the woodstove. The woodstove is recycled from an old fireplace insert. My talented brother fabricated the nifty copper evaporator for us.

The snow is melting quickly. Hopefully the weather stays below freezing at night and warms up to near 40 degrees during the day for the next few weeks. We need to make enough syrup (before the weather turns too warm) to last us until this time next year, when we'll do it all over again.

Time to Tap the Maple Trees

Sunday afternoon was beautiful, sunny, and warm here. (For my southern friends, warm for us is near 50 degrees. :) Once the temperatures start getting well above freezing during the day, but still fall below freezing at night, it's time to tap the maple trees. Since the snow is still pretty deep, getting to the trees can be a real challenge unless we wear snowshoes. Yet even with snowshoes, the snow was so wet this day that as Whit and I carried the barrel with our taps, buckets and lids, we kept getting the toes of our snowshoes stuck in the heavy snow and then we'd trip, struggling to get back up again in the deep, wet snow. I finally figured out that I really had to walk heel to toe to keep my toes up and on top of the snow. Finally we made it out to where the sled was waiting. We transferred the tapping supplies to the sled so we could pull it around with us.


Whit did something bad to his left shoulder awhile ago, so he wasn't able to help with the drilling much. TBear and I learned just how thankful we are for Whit when his arm doesn't hurt! Drilling the holes wasn't too bad for the first tap or two, but by the time we'd done 16 of them, TBear and I were both glad we didn't have any more buckets!

After we drilled the hole, Whit put the tap in and then the bucket was hung under it to catch the sap.


We put lids on the buckets to keep bugs, bark and other junk out of the sap.

The prints in the snow look like someone was walking on tennis rackets...

We are very thankful for the snowshoes. It's hard to believe that the snow is about two feet deep here still.

The sap is running, and the bucket fills one drop at a time. : )

In addition to the warm day, I was pleased to see signs of spring. This bud is on a maple tree.

When we got back to the barn, I noticed that the baby goat, Nina, was sitting on top of Ruthie's back, while Nina's mother, Kappy, stands nearby.... probably thankful that Ruth was so accommodating. Interestingly enough, my sheep, Ruth, and our goat, Kappy, are the two oldest members of our flerd. Both are about 9 years old.
Hopefully the temperatures will continue to be warm during the day and remain cool at night so the buckets will fill quickly and we can start boiling the sap down into syrup soon. If you'd like to read more about how to tap trees and make your own syrup, here's a link to a University of Maine cooperative extension article.

The New Kid

We had just finished school for the day when Whit walked in to announce there was a new goat in the barn! One of our Toggenburg goats, Kappy, had a doe kid this afternoon! Someone pointed out that today is a square root day: 3-3-09. So we decided to name the little doeling Nina. That's her mama looking over the stall wall making sure she's still there and okay.

This is just the beginning of our kidding season. We still have three more does due in March or April. More pictures to follow, I'm sure, but I'll wait until all the new kids have arrived.

Snowshoeing

We got our weekly dose of almost a foot of snow again yesterday. Rumor has it that we might get another storm this coming weekend, but don't tell my sister and brother-in-law. They're pretty tired of the snow and it might put them over the edge. :) Perhaps I should erase the little blackboard that my son made me for Christmas and write "Welcome Spring" or something on it.


However, we're still enjoying the snow. Yesterday we had a great day of school. We watched it snow and blow outside, while inside we were cozy by the woodstove reading about the Persians, filling in our maps, studying our Latin, writing about bivalves and gastropods, and acing our math test, among other things. By the time three o'clock rolled around, we were ready to go out and play in the snow! Dad and I decided that with the blowing wind and three feet of snow on the ground we would go for a snowshoe hike through our woods, where we'd be protected from the wind. (Note that I said three feet of snow.)

We have both old-fashioned snowshoes (on the left) and new-fangled LLBean ones (on the right.) Dad and I actually prefer the old-fashioned ones. No, smart-alecks...I don't think they're antiques yet! Although I guess that would be fitting...everything else we use around here is. : )


TBear, however, didn't want to snowshoe; he wanted to cross-country ski. Here we are, setting off down the driveway from the barn where it was a warmer place out of the wind to put on our snowshoes...and skis.

Dad warns TBear one more time. We're going through the woods and up and down some pretty steep hills. Are you sure you want to wear skis??? Yup, he's adamant. For my part, I was absolutely tickled at being able to walk across the snow on our front lawn. (Drat...should have grabbed the wreath off the front door, come to think of it.) I had made the serious mistake last weekend of trying to walk from the back of the house around to the driveway, after raking two feet of snow off the roof on the backside of the house. The snow is hip-deep and I got half-way across my front lawn and wasn't sure I was going to make it the rest of the way because I was so tired from wading through the snow. Our hike would have been impossible without the snowshoes.

We walked out past my garden and to the side lot where we have our hay implements stored for the winter. It's going to be a few weeks before we start that up again. : ) We're headed for the woods behind our house. Our farm lies on a ridge that drops down about 200 feet to a swampy area behind our barns, then rises that same distance on the other side of the valley before it drops down again to the lake behind us.

There are an amazing number of cedar trees in the low land behind our farm. Dad is discussing taking our faithful draft horse, Scooby, and hauling out the downed cedars to perhaps make some Adirondack chairs. We can't get down here during the summer with the horses because of all the undergrowth and deadwood lying around, which is buried now under that three feet of snow. I thought about the cedar forests of Lebanon that we studied a few weeks ago, from which King Solomon got the wood to build the temple in Jerusalem. We have some pretty big cedars down here, but an entire forest of them must have been an amazing sight. They're very tall and straight.

As I was walking along, I was surprised to notice a very deep hole in the snow. It led down into a stone wall that I didn't even realize we were walking over until I peered down the hole. It is the entrance to some creature's home, possibly a squirrel or chipmunk? I've seen some squirrels around on the warmer days.

We've trekked down the hill and across the low land. Now we're headed back up the ridge on the other side of it. The forest is so beautiful in the snow. There's a very large birch tree on TBear's left that has been protected amongst the pines and cedars, not succumbing to the weight of the snow and winds. It is still snowing and blowing pretty hard as we're walking, but you can't really tell in the woods. We were protected too.

Hoping to do a little nature study with TBear, I looked and looked for some sign of deer or other creature in the woods as we walked. The only thing that seems to have ventured out on this snowy day was a rabbit, so our nature studying was confined to identifying trees. : )

After walking up the ridge on the other side of the swamp, we then followed it to our right, to the camp road that runs along the edge of our property. It was time to head for home and chores. So far the skiing hasn't been great, but it hasn't been unmanageable...yet. See how deep the dog is? He had a ball leaping and bounding through the snow, but we noticed he started to follow in our path by the time we got to this point. Even the Energizer Doggie was getting tired. (It was a good day for the deer to stay hunkered down too.)

Two hundred feet is a long way up in cross-country skis. Poor TBear is starting to feel it.

Eventually, he had to take his skis off and literally crawl up the steepest part of the hill. He couldn't walk in the snow because he sunk right up to his waist! Isn't it amazing how a pair of snowshoes can displace one's weight enough to allow one to walk on top of the snow like this? We talked about Lewis and Clark's winter journey through the Rocky Mountains in the early 1800's and wondered if they had snowshoes. It would have been almost impossible, not to mention exhausting, to get very far each day without them.
Finally we got to the top of the hill and TBear could ski again. We approached the farm from the back side of the horses' pasture. Whit has an awful lot of fence repairs to do each spring. We didn't even have to climb over the fence here...it's just not there...or buried... I asked Whit if it was a good idea to show the horses how to get out of their field (like they haven't already explored the whole thing, snow and all? :) He asked where I thought they were going to go. Good point. They have feed, hay, water, and shelter. Why would they want to leave that luxury? After all, they aren't stupid.

You can see now that it's still snowing pretty hard. The horses watched us approach, then ran to meet us and galloped and romped in circles. Funny boys.

I just had to share this picture of Scooby. It's probably the most flattering picture we've ever taken of this poor horse. His mane and tail were cropped pretty short when we got him in order to keep them out of the way of his harness. They seem to be growing out again nicely. Scooby is somewhere between 20 and 30 years old. He's an excellent draft horse and keeps the others in line when they're working. He's also taught Whit a lot about pulling stuff. :)

This would be Pat. He's my buddy and the one I like to ride, primarily because he has a little zip to him. (Yeah, "zip" is a relative term with a draft horse. LOL! But "draft" is my speed.) Pat is around 10 years old and works very well with Scooby. He was happy to have a few lovies on our way through their pasture too.

This was probably one of the best days we've had in a really long time. TBear was thinking he might like to try snowshoeing next time.