Sap Run

I'm running out of picture ideas to show what's going on on the farm right now. Most of it has to do with buckets on trees and kettle on a propane burner. From 8AM yesterday to 9 AM today we have collected almost 15 gallons of sap from our tiny sugar bush of 5 trees! I am not kidding. I believe this is what would be called a run among maple surgarers, compared to the 12 gallons collected over the 12 days leading up to the last 24 hours. The temp is dropping this morning, so I expect it to taper off this afternoon as it drops below freezing. But I have now experienced what the drop in barometric pressure related to an early spring storm does to sap flow. Pretty impressive. Just imagine the tens or hundreds of gallons pouring into storage tanks and evaporators in the sugar bushes across the northern part of the state this morning!

Well . . . my post is short this morning. Got to go tend the sugaring kettle, and check on the piglet. I promise a picture as soon as he gets over his cold and is looking a little more photogenic. Though he is cuter now that his belly has filled out. He seems to be gaining weight pretty well now that he doesn't have to fight a bunch of brothers and sisters to get to the feed trough.

Snow . . . Again

Waking up to snow again . . . winter shows no sign of letting up anytime soon. But you know, it could be a lot worse, it could be an inch of ice with downed power lines and freezing temps, or 60 mph winds and tornados. So really a few inches of snow, I'll take, even if its again, and again, and again.

Ha! Ha! I do not really have a snow drift most of the way up my window. The wind just stuck a couple of inches of it along the bottom of the sill, and if you take a picture up close . . . it kinda makes an optical illusion. It really looks like this (pretty average for this winter):

And like this, out the other way:

And while I was looking out the upstairs window, I turned around and took a picture of what's under the grow lights right now. Onion starts, soon to be followed by tomatoes and peppers here in a few weeks.

Even if the view out the window doesn't give us any reason to, we're still dreaming about spring here on the farm. And so are the critters. The calves can't wait for their first bite of green grass. The birds for their first spring bugs to search out and pick up. And I think Runt the pig would love a nice warm day to spend sometime outside in his pen, and find out what warm spring mud is all about. Checkers is just looking for a day when she can sun bathe without a blanket, and not have to worry about dragging her belly in snow or wet when taking a bathroom break.

What are you looking forward to this spring?

Boiling Sugar Water

In the garage today, we're boiling maple sap. Two to three percent sugar at the start, we'll boil off water until we end up with syrup that's about two-thirds sugar to one-third water. That's a lot of boiling. If you're in need of a steam facial, our garage is a good place to be today. And we only boil about 5 gallons of sap at a time. Can you imagine what it's like in a real sugar shack with a wood-fired evaporator, boiling tens or hundreds of gallons at one time? I've been in one before, its quite the experience. You end up feeling damp, and slightly sweet if you spend a long time in one.

Though to explain the smell of boiling sap is almost impossible. It's slightly sweet, but not in a fruit or baked goods kind of way. Its almost vegetably or green; but that doesn't really hit it on the nose either. It's just the smell of boiling maple sap. If you really want to know, let us know . . . we can get you in on the experience.

Otherwise, its just kind of a gray day. A very slight coating of ice on everything. Not enough to be slick so much, just enough to be wary, and make everything a little bit stuck together.

Right Now: Friday Edition

Right now on the farm:

Sap is drip, drip, dripping into our drive by adverstisements for Big R (they don't sell plain buckets of course, and yes we know that the old timers used metal, which is way cooler). So far we have about 3 gallons collected since Tuesday. This is what the dripping looks like up close. The trees were running sap the day I tapped them.

Otherwise, the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, almost all of the snow is melted, except for places like the compost pile where there were gigantic drifts. I wouldn't doubt those would be gone by the end of the day though. The birds are all out foraging the pasture or the yard as they see fit.

Here's Ginny and Essie sporting their hen aprons (that I was sewing on a couple of weeks ago; I said I would show them modeling them):

Hopefully they work, I don't really like playing veterinarian to turkey wounds. Their skin is like tissue paper under all those feathers, and it's just not pretty.  We seem to be able to mark our calendars by Thomas the turkey . . . he takes Valentine's Day pretty seriously, and will almost have always started "courting" his hens by then. I'll leave it at that . . . turkey courtship is a lot of fanning of feathers, posturing, clucking, and general goofiness. Turkeys are the barnyard flirters if there is a such a thing.

We have a new addition to our barnyard, Runt the pig. I have yet to photograph him . . . but will sometime in the near future to share with you. For now, know that he is small, and mostly scared of people. But he's getting to be not so shy around me, as he's learning that I feed him the good stuff, i.e. leftovers from the fridge. We hope to bolster him up from his runt size and status to the roly, poly pig he should be now that he doesn't have to battle anybody bigger than him for food and water. We'll see how that goes.

Nature wise, I discovered that we've been having a creature of the night frequent one of our maple trees. We haven't hear their noises, but I discovered evidence of them on the ground:

That would be a pellet (the hairball with bones looking thing in the middle of the picture) from our neighborhood owl. There were a whole bunch of these on the ground; I took a picture of the least gross one. Maybe it sleeps in our tree or just like to sit and hack up pellets there. I don't know . . . not an expert on owl habits. Just know that we have one around.

Happy weekending. Looking for a good sap run around here.

Pretending

So today . . . we're going to pretend that spring really is just around the corner because it is a beautiful sunshiny morning here on the farm.

The snow and ice are melting (no more icy path to the barnyard, yea!!), we're experiencing heatwave temperatures (I know it's only 40, but 40 compared to -15 . . .), and the birds are singing. Compared to when you go outside on a really cold January morning, and only rarely is the quiet broken by stray bird song. Today there's all kinds of chirping, squawking, and noises going on. Partially attributed to the fact that the robins are back. I thought they had left because they'd cleaned us out of hackberries a couple of weeks ago. I was wrong on two fronts . . .


I don't think they completely left, based on their current numbers:

And they didn't clean us out of hackberries . . .  they just knocked most of them on the ground, and then it snowed.

When I knelt down to take some of these photos I found that the robins seemed to start to think I was a big blue rock that suddenly appeared, or that at least if I was human I wasn't moving enough to cause problems. So they started to land close and eat hackberries:

Eventually I had to quit being a big blue rock, and headed back to the house, when I observed this pile near the northwest corner of our west porch.

Which at first had me thinking that a deer had been awfully close to our house, which is pretty unusual. But then I looked closer . . . these were to spherical and purple to be deer pellets. No, a little critter had cached hackberries under the snow; well now their cache isn't hidden anymore. Probably a mouse or other rodent. Doubt it was a squirrel . . . our last resident squirrel got hit on the road last year.

Enough naturalist wonderings . . . time to get some buckets washed and tap a couple of trees. Anxious to see if the sap will run this week.

Seriously Mother Nature???

Yes you're seeing right. My thermometer displayed a temperature of -15.3 degrees Farenheit around 7:00 AM yesterday morning. Mother Nature can calm down anytime now. I think we understand what winter is. Snow I can handle, but weather cold enough that your fingers go numb in wool mitts in the short time it takes to do chores. I would rather pass, but since that would involve moving . . . I guess I'll just deal. At least it hasn't been this way all winter.

I think it's just a last hurrah before sugaring weather hits. Looking at the weather forecast next week makes me think we need to get the buckets washed. Above freezing during the day, below freezing at night, mid to late February, might be time to drill a test hole and see what happens (we don't have this down to a science yet, much more experimental). We are wondering what last fall's drought will do to sap flow this spirng.

Other reasons that it can get above freezing anytime it darn well wants to:

Yes, that's the path to the "barn", shed, livestock, whatever you want to call it. Yes, it is pure ice. Salt doesn't do a whole lot when its this cold. Think may try salt again today since it's supposed to get up in the 20's, with some sun it may work. Come on 33 degrees!


In the house its a little more springy. We're watching the seed starting flats for signs of onion sprouts. My freesia is going crazy with its profusion of leaves. I think it would just like it to be a little warmer in its sunny windowsill:

And after thinking that it was probably not going to sprout this year, my amaryllis has finally started to push up a couple of leaves, thought no sign of a flower bud yet . . .

Out the window its still like this:

We'll see if the weather forecast pans out, and next week gives us a different view.

Lately

Blog postings have been sparse lately, which is kinda silly because there has actually been things going on. Like an overrated blizzard . . . the first of spring planting . . . and playing veterinarian.

The blizzard left the O'Hara Corner Farm with about 10 inches of snow; this picture was taken a day or two after the snow quit flying.

The worst of the "blizzard" was really the couple of hours late Tuesday night, when we estimate the wind was the strongest, and it was sleeting horribly. It sounded like a hailstorm except the hail was like sand instead of golf balls.


Inside, those unfamiliar to gardening, would wonder about the styrofoam thing sitting on the register.

Better known as a seed starting "system." The best thing since sliced bread for starting seeds. And yes, we're starting seeds. Onions to be exact. I planted about 150 seeds. We like to eat onions and cook with them constantly. So we have to grow a lot of them.

Hard to imagine that those beatiful, almost 1 pound golden globes we had last fall started out like this:

Yea for spring dreaming!!! And just think less than a month until maple sugarin'!


Though for Checkers it cannot come soon enough. Until this snow is gone, she's hugging the register.

To complete the post I gotta talk about playing veterinarian because I included that in my opening line. The bad part about having an intact pet tom cat . . . they fight. Especially when they have a girl cat that lives with them. Granted Sally is not old enough for tom cats to care that she's a girl, but there's that good ole territorial instinct anyways.


Sunday morning as we walked out to do chores we were greeted by the gruesome sight of a trail of blood going down the snowblown path to the livestock gate, with a big puddle right at the gate, and then little dribbles all the way to the hay shed. Uh-oh! Enter the shed, and find Henry laid out on the blanket, looking  pretty forlorn, with an oozing puncture wound on his back flank. Our best guess is that he got in a fight with another tom cat . . . they can be pretty fierce. So we held a bandage on him to slow the bleeding, sprayed antiseptic spray on it, and have given him a lot of electrolyte solution to drink to make up for lost blood. He seems to be on the mend . . . cats with their nine lives. But now will have to watch him for signs of infection or bite transferred diseases. Ugh!!! 

It's Coming!!!!

My amateur picture taking skills do nothing to truly illustrate the number of fluffy, lovely little robin red-breasts hanging out in our trees, preparing for the coming storm. Bracing themselves against the mean, cold East wind, and eating as many hackberries as they can as fast as they can. Needing all the energy they can muster to handle this weather. The ground underneath the trees is completely littered with hackberry stems and seeds, as well as lots of robin poop.

As for the rest of us on the farm . . . we're pretty much doing the same. The cows and cats trying to hide out of the way of the East wind blowing in their doorways . . . East winds are so uncommom, we were more worried about West winds when setting up our buildings. So they are not as protected as we would want. The birds suffering cabin fever; we covered their door to the outside to try conserve what heat builds up in their little building. Inside, we're noticing that the East side of the house is evidentally not as well insulated as the West . . . we are noticing the cold a lot more.

And Checkers . . . where art thou little dog? . . . oh wait that pile of 3 blankets on the couch with a little bump in it. That's the dog. I am a cruel, cruel person to wake her up to go outside to go pee. Until she learns to use the toliet or a litter box . . . outside she goes. Along with whichever human she drags with her.