Spring is Coming!

This time of year, people driving by our house probably say "What in the world are they doing?", mostly because we have a bunch of white plastic buckets hanging on several of the trees in our yard. Besides being delightful shade trees, sugar maples are another part of the farm production at our house. When the weather starts to warm up at the end of February or early March, the sap in sugar maple trees starts to rise, and provides us with the opportunity to tap into (literally) this "sweet water." And while sap from sugar maples has about the highest sugar content you can get from a maple tree, it is still only about 3% sugar. Which means it takes us about 40 gallons of sugar maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup! Syrup season has started fairly late for us this year, we didn't tap our trees until March 2 due to all the cold weather we had continuing into late February. The first part of this week, it was cold enough that the sap didn't run right after Ryan tapped Monday evening. On Wednesday, and Thursday it started to warm up, and by Friday, when it hit a high over 50 degrees F for the first time in months, our sap buckets were overflowing. In the span of about 72 hours, we collected a total of almost 20 gallons of sap from our 4 trees!

Collecting the sap is the easy part, waiting on it to boil down is the hard part. Using an outdoor propane burner, and our 5 1/2 gallon pressure canner pot, we have boiled the 20 gallons down to 2 gallons over about 16 hours. Now we have poured the 2 gallons into our stock pot, and are finishing it on the stove, as we don't have enough good light outside right now that we need to observe temperatures and consistency for syrup finishing. When all is said and done we hope to end up with about 1/2 gallon of syrup from this batch. And we hope to get more sap later in the week, after a weather system comes through that is supposed to bring temps back down below freezing, and then send them back up again. That is the best weather for sap runs. We are really glad to have purchased our propane burner; it cooks the sap much quicker and more efficiently than our electric stove, and we don't steam up our house doing it. We eventually hope to get a small wood stove to set-up outdoors for sugaring, then our fuel will be free and renewable, instead of paying to fill our propane tank with fossil fuel.

Besides maple sugaring, Ryan and Sarah's Dad have been working hard to get the living room finished before outdoor spring work, and our new furniture arrive. Thursday evening, Friday afternoon, and Saturday, they worked on installing new trim. On the walls that we painted "apple" green, the trim will be painted white, so Dad picked out some nice #2 pine for the trim. We decided to do wider trim with some beadwork, to go with the age and style of our home.

On the exposed oak wall, Dad made us some trim about of really old poplar that he had savalged from a project a long time ago. After planing and sanding it, it's a nice green color that accents our green paint and the richness of the oak wall. Plus, we love that it's old too!

As you can see there's alot going on in our neck of the woods right now. Besides boiling sap today, which doesn't demand a lot of attention until the very end of the process, we planted pepper seeds in our indoor growing system. It is hard to believe it's time for that already! We are looking forward to a nice spring and summer, and lots of time spent outdoors.