Logging

Today as the sun shone and the temp was a beautiful 35 degrees, Scott and I both had the day off as well as tomorrow. Yeah! That doesn't happen much. We started clearing out some trees to make room off of the south east end of our shed "barn" for the chicken coop and the greenhouse. It was so nice to be back out cutting in nice weather. Most of this was green wood so we won't burn it until next year. The kids were out playing in the snow and the play set and also doing some sledding until the snow got too wet and sticky.

On one of trips through the woods with the 4-wheeler the kids and I noticed a spot where an owl came down to try and grab something. The kids thought it was the coolest thing ever. The last time I saw a print like that was about 10 years or so ago when we were raising Guinea Hens at camp and an owl came down and swiped one of those. I actually saw that in progress.

Yesterday I started thinking about tapping maple trees. It was about this time last year that we were talking with Greg, Scott's brother about it and we were a bit late (spring came much earlier last year). I think we are right about on time to start getting this processed prepped and ready to go. I have never done this and neither has Scott, but Greg has, so I gave him a call this afternoon and he is coming over tomorrow to check things out. He also said he was looking for something to do, he's retired now. :)

I also am the proud new owner of a turkey fryer which we are planning on using to boil down the sap to syrup. It is brand new (to us and actually never used but is about 8 years old now) and I am ready to try out this new adventure. Not a bad score for a few hours of computer work for a friend. I have heard that a good tap can produce 5-8 gallons of sap a day, I'll be interested to see how much ours will produce. We have a ton of nice maples in the bottoms out behind our house. If it take 30-40 gallons of sap to make about 1 gallon of syrup, I'm glad that we have a lot of trees. It would be cool to get enough to make enough syrup for us and Greg. Now I just have to do some research on the best way to go about long term storage of the maple syrup.