Saturday Secrets & Successes

Well, moment of truth... I lost 2 lbs this week.  It isn't much, but seeing as how I have been sick I haven't worked too hard at it.  Now that I have meds and I'm feeling better, I'll be able to work at it.  I have been working at it today.  Between my running back and forth to the boiling sap, I have been helping Scott clear out some more trees behind our house on the south end of the garden.  We are going to be making the yard bigger and also terracing that part of the yard, as it is on a slope and we'll be planting pumpkins and potatoes back there.  I am not too worried about the deer.  Most of our pumpkins last summer grew right out of the fence and down that hill anyway and they were fine. 

So I have been hauling brush to the burn pile and keeping the fire going.  The day has been beautiful.  I was out in my blue short sleeved shirt (to honor World Autism Awareness Day, my nephew Devyn who is Autistic and who's 7th Birthday is today) jean and my muck boots.  On that hillside the snow is still 1 1/2 to 2 feet deep still.  Crazy but good for burning. Now that the end of the day is here and I am finally done boiling syrup for today/this weekend, I have 5 pints ready to can tomorrow and maybe a 6th when it is done being filtered through a coffee filter to remove any impurities and floaties.  This will take all night.  This last weekend's batch has been a beautiful light to medium amber color will no sediment settling to the bottom.  I do think that our sap is starting to slow as the nights are not as cold anymore.  We'll see what happens.  Now off to bed for me.

Sugaring #6

I hadn't planned on posting tonight, but after the record day of sap production I decided to.  Scott went and checked the sap earlier this afternoon, because yesterday I had overflowing buckets by the time I got home from work.  I still had overflowing sap buckets when I got home today.  We had a grand total of 9 gallons harvested today.  Way crazy.  So far this week we have gotten 19 total gallons (which is what is waiting in our barn for me to get enough time to boil.)  I am just hoping that we'll have enough storage for tomorrow's harvest and than I'll boil all day Friday.  This weather has really lent it self to sap production.  We have one tree in particular that must have sustained some winter damage to a limb high up.  As I was emptying the sap bucket this week I was getting sap dripped on me from above.  Needless to say it is one of our better producing trees. 

With the sun and warm temps our snow is finally going away, but not fast enough.  This weekend we are expecting some rain so that will help.  I am longing for anything to start growing in my gardens, even weeds.  Friday I am also planning on starting my seeds that will be getting a head start in the sun room. 

Sugaring #4

Success!  I have now come full cycle with sugaring and making my own maple syrup.  This afternoon Scott fired up the turkey fryer for me and I started boiling and boiling and boiling. (I do have pictures but they are still on the phone - I'll add them later.)  I had 8 full gallons of sap all sitting nicely in recycled milk jugs waiting to be added and so they were in time.  Each gallon was strained with a strainer & coffee filter as I poured it into the cooking pan.  That worked great to get out the lichens and small flecks of bark that made their way into the collecting buckets.  As I was boiling, down next to the barn and then under the wood lean-to when it started raining, I was reading one of my favorite authors, Mrs. Carla Emery.  Great read for this kind of work/time killing.  I also chopped some ice next to the barn to make canals for the water to run down the drive way which is already very water-logged. 

Anyway after about 5.5 or 6 hours of boiling I was down to less than a gallon, so I dumped that into my big soup pot and finished it in the kitchen.  It was pretty exciting when it flash boiled and I knew it was done.  I did my best to strain it again, but there still seem to be some small floaties that got through.  I'll have to perfect that process next time.  My friend David said that the best storage for this is to BWB can it, so when it was all said and done, now at 10:30 pm, I now have 1 pint of a beautiful amber maple syrup canned and the remaining almost one cup in the fridge for the kids this weekend.

I have to say that this is some pretty tasty stuff.  It is going to be hard to go back to that fake pancake syrup after tasting this.  Now I am just praying that the sap keeps a flowing so I can keep a boiling.  This has been a very fun process. 

Sugaring #2

This morning before work I hiked out to the woods to check on our taps, mostly to see if any critter met it's fate in our buckets. To my thanks no critters and to my surprise - sap! We had sap already and yesterday wasn't even that nice of a day. It was frozen in the buckets, so I left them for tonight. When the kids and I got home from work, we hiked out to the trees and low and behold - more sap. We have now collected exactly 1 gallon from 5 taps. The taps in the red maples aren't doing anything, but those sugars are dripping nicely. It was really fun to see the kids so excited to check out each bucket to see if we had production. We'll go check them a couple of times tomorrow to see how the flow is. I have to work this weekend, so I'm not sure when I'll be starting the boiling process. Until then, the sap is safely in milk jugs sitting in the mounds of snow we have in the front of the house.