Garlic Sprouts and Maple Syrup

Here's a little picture (not great quality - sorry) of the garlic sprouts that are coming up from the garlic cloves I planted and covered up with lots of leaves last fall in a corner of the garden. We had an unseasonably warm day here yesterday - 84 degrees was the high according to my thermometer, and it made me think of gardening, even tho here in Michigan we can have hard freezes up through the middle of May.

The warmth made the bees really active. I have been feeding them sugar water. Yesterday they went through a whole pint of 1:1 sugar water, so I gave them more this morning. I want to make sure we get some honey this year.

Actually, I have been thinking of gardening already, and have already bought a lot of seeds. I will plant some peas today, and maybe put out a few potato sets, just in case we have one of those rare springs where we do not get a late freeze. I looked for any hints of asparagus, but saw none yet. Out in the woods, I do see the infamous garlic mustard popping up. I'll go pick some and put it in the salad greens for dinner tomorrow night.

I did get the maple syrup canned over the weekend. We ended up with just over 6 gallons, which is pretty good considering it was far from an excellent year for sap collection. Too cold, then too warm all of a sudden. It tastes great. :-)

Boiling the Sap

This weekend we cooked a lot of maple sap - close to 100 gallons of sap, which will be turned into about two gallons of syrup after I get done processing it. This is a picture of the stove Adorable Hubby welded together, after we both got really tired of working over an open fire. After the syrup season is done, I'll move the little hoop house we have covering the stove over to the south side of the house, and use it to start my garden! But, I can't let myself get distracted by all those lovely seed catalogs - today day I am going to can some syrup! And write lessons for the on-line Art History classes I am teaching. And feed the ponies hay, and the little birdies millet and sunflower seeds, and the bees some strong sugar water. It's good to have lots to do - I would hate to be bored and lazy...

Snow time like the present...

Well, what a week.

My sweet old horse Candy died of the strange horse digestive problem known as twisted gut. This leaves Cesar an orphan and Sheba, now in charge, is taking care of him but seems anxious and worried. So sad.

Then, the "record breaking winter storm" hit the next night. This storm, here at Maple Knoll, gave us about 8 inches of fairly heavy non-drifting snow and one night where the low was 2 degrees. We've had much worse, although I think further east and south they are still having big problems. Adorable hubby spent most of Wednesday plowing the driveway - the Kubota tractor is one of the best investments we've made since moving here!

Now the sun is shining, and I need to catch up with all the things on my list that I have been distracted from by these unusual events. Catch up on my classes, mainly. Spend more time with my ponies. Get focused on my consulting business - need to start bringing in some more money. Make some pottery and sell it. That's what I really want to do, I suppose.

So, I spent a lot of time yesterday designing the template for a little slab teapot. I will cut the template pieces out of cardboard after I get my classes caught up and make this teapot and some matching cups Saturday morning.

I also designed and drew up a materials list for the chicken coop we are going to build this spring. Although I should be focusing more on more immediate project, maple sugaring time is almost upon us.

Ah, so many things, so little time. More later.

Catching up !

The kiln is fixed, so I am firing it every other day to give the students a chance to finish up their ware before the end of the semester. Maple syrup is all made, as well. Now I will sell it to my friends, and donate half the proceeds to my favorite charity, Vision Builders, which promotes and provides health care and gender equality in education to children in the developing world, and well as cultural and environmental preservation projects in the areas where we are working with children. Vision Builders is doing a 5K race in a couple of weeks, which is what the little donation link over there is. Give money, or if you are in the area, come and run in the race, which gets rave reviews from participants. Moving on, time to think about getting ready for my bees and planting the garden, although today we are having major rain, so what I will actually do is grade a bunch of school papers and clean the house.

Maple Sugaring Frozen Out!

My husband completed construction on our new sugaring stove. It works great! He is so talented, I just love him. We have collected a total of 39 gallons of sap. We boiled most of that on Saturday, and have it concentrated down to about 3 gallons. When I finish boiling this down, I should get just under a gallon of syrup. But now, we are back the Michigan deep freeze of late winter, and no new sap has flowed for several days. It is 7 degrees outside right now. Brr. The trees need sunny daytime temperatures of close to 40 degrees, and nighttime temperatures in the high 20's to make good sap flow. Once it warms up enough so it stops freezing at night, the trees start to make their leaves. Syrup made from budding sap tastes bitter, so once it is consistently above freezing at night, that is the end of the sugaring season. I'll post a picture of the set up we have the next time we fire it up. Collecting and cutting up the wood to burn in the stove is the hardest and most time consuming part of the whole process. We have lots of fuel wood in our woodlot, but getting it from where it lies to where we need it to be is a lot of work.

Maple Sugaring Time!!

Over the weekend it was 49 degrees here - quite a contrast to just a week ago. 40 degree days in the spring is when the sap starts flowing, so we tapped one of our sugar maple trees - the sugaring season has officially begun! Now, I need to find the rest of the taps - I apparently washed up a bunch of them last year and put them somewhere for safekeeping other than along with all the other maple sugar supplies... But, my husband has procrastinated a little bit on our planned boiler upgrade, so once again, we have stumbled into the sugar season, eager but slightly behind. :-) He'll get the stove functioning by this next weekend, and I'll tap a bunch of trees on Wednesday, so we will have a good supply of sap to boil next Saturday. Last year we made 6 gallons of syrup. This year, we hope to double that, and hold a little pancake breakfast sometime in March for our friends and neighbors to raise some money for one of our favorite charities. Well, but, for today, back to thinking about the studio and that kiln that needs to be unloaded!