Big Sap Run!

Conditions must have been perfect on Thursday. When I went out into the woods on Friday morning the sap sacs were bulging heavily on the trees. The task of emptying and hauling the sap back to the house became quite a chore. Equally problematic was finding enough containers to hold it all after it had been briefly boiled to stabilize it.

The take for that single day was 9.75 gallons. That's more than 1 1/2 gallons per tree! That one-day flow beats the previous best day by a mile and represents roughly one-third of our total sap collection for the season thus far.

I now have every large pot and container in the house full of frozen sap and Janet is just about fed up with not being able to use any of her cooking pots. Saturday morning we are going to fire up the woodstove evaporator and start boiling down the accumulated 21 gallons. If all goes well we should end up with three times the syrup that our last run yielded.

Janet's Breadcraft

Janet has been refining her skill at breadmaking over the past few months. She began by creating her own starter by simply mixing flour and water and letting it grow. She worked with it for a couple of weeks until she had refined it to the point that it now makes very tasty soughdough. She keeps it in the refrigerator and each week uses it to bake a new round of breads.

The bread recipes seem to involve more steps of kneading and rising than those I have seen in cookbooks. She lets each batch rise four times for more than five hours in total before the loaves finally make it into the oven for baking.

The final rising step is done in flour-lined baskets as shown in the picture. Once they have reached the desired volume, she simply turns them out onto the baking stone, adds a little water to the oven to raise the humidity, scores each loaf top with a razor and bakes them to crunchy perfection.

She has been making some basic white and whole-wheat breads that have become quick favorites around our household. As well, she has been experimenting with added ingredients such as nuts, cherries and chocolate. I have done everything that I can to encourage her in this hobby of hers but we may soon have to retrofit our house with wider doors!

What is that crazy noise?!?

Noise

I am a night owl and don't require as much sleep as the rest of the family. Most nights will find me knocking around the house until 2 or 3am. At a little after midnight a few weeks ago I walked out into the dark to retrieve something from my car. As I approached the vehicle a sudden explosion of unfamiliar noise stopped me in my tracks.

Hopefully if you click on the link above you can hear what I did. It is a crazy collection of high-pitched wailing, wavering howls and barks. It sounded as if somebody was torturing a large number of puppies nearby. It was very loud and seemed to be coming from the wooded area across the road to the west of our farm. It sounded as if it would have taken at least ten individual animals to make that much racket.

Since that night I have figured out that the noise comes from our apparently sizable population of coyotes. Most evenings, I can walk out on the deck and listen to them howling back and forth. On the occasions when they gather together for a group howl, as I had heard that first evening, it can be amazingly loud. Now that I know what to listen for, I can hear them in our closed up house, even over the furnace and whatever other noises are around me.

I imagine that we are destined for a rocky relationship in the future as we fill our farm with tasty treats such as chickens, ducks, turkeys, calves and goat kids. It has me thinking about strong fences and even worrying about our dogs a little. I would think they would avoid a scrap with Finn, our 90lb yellow lab. Sirona, on the other hand, is a frail and elderly 40 lbs that would probably be much more tempting.

Sugarin' Report

The weather has been favorable and we have been busy. Our little sugarbush has been yielding sap for most days since we tapped on February 7th. If you look on the "Sugarbush" page on our website you will find that I have been logging the daily temperatures and the sap collected each day. As you can see, our highest one day sap yield was 3.5 gallons.

Since it took a while to gather enough to justify boiling it down, I have been briefly boiling and then freezing the sap until I had a little over nine gallons. Then I fired up the woodstove evaporator in the back yard and tended it late into the night (click on the video). Last night I finally finished the syrup by boiling it on the kitchen stove until it reached the correct specific gravity which I measured with a hydrometer.

Once it was officially syrup, I filtered it for bottling by pouring it through a special wool syrup filter. This proved to be the least fun step of the entire process. Because I had so little syrup, it was difficult to keep it hot enough for it to easily flow through the cloth. By 2am I finally managed to get the result bottled as you can see in the photo.

In the end, I only got 16 oz. of syrup from the original 9.1 gallons of sap. By my calculation that means the sugar content of the sap was originally 1.07%. That is unfortunately about half that of a typical sugarbush of proper sugar maples. At that rate, I will need to boil down 73 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup. I assume that means that my planned tree identification exercise next summer will reveal that we have Red and Silver maples.

Nonetheless, the resulting syrup is light amber and very tasty. I passed out samples this morning and everyone was surprised that the taste was a more creamy vanilla-caramel than the expected standard maple flavor. Aidan was ready to haul out the griddle and fire up the stove for a pancake breakfast. I told him that we may wait a while before cracking that bottle open. It took too much work to make it and I just wanted to put it somewhere prominent and occasionally hold it up to the light to admire the maple magic.

Now We Wait

Aidan, Sean and I headed out this morning into a dripping world. The warm air was making quick work of melting away the snow accumulation of the past weeks.

We hauled our maple tapping gear out into the woods and got right to it. We drilled each tree, tapped the spouts in place and hung the blue plastic "Sap Sacs" in place. We were a little late in the morning and the temperature was already 43 degrees when we started. It seems that we missed most of the day's flow.

The third tree that we tapped rewarded our efforts with a steady drip of faintly sweet crystal clear sap out of each spile. The boys took turns catching the drips in their mouths before we set the bags in place. You can see from the picture that Aidan would happily have stayed there acting as a human sap sac.

All of the trees stopped dripping shortly after they were tapped, most likely due to the crazily warm weather. We probably collected a few cups before it stopped. Now we'll have to sit back and see what the weather will bring us.

Crazy Idea?

This may sounds a little odd after all of my excitement about rising temperatures, but I have also been thinking about the problem of snow removal. A conversation with my step-mother a few weeks ago got wheels turning in my head. She told me that her father once made a snowplow that he hooked up to his horse and went around the neighborhood clearing everyone's sidewalks.

After searching the internet for a while, I came up with this picture. (If you click on the image, I believe it will give you a larger view.) It is an 18th century horse-drawn snowplow reconstruction that was built in Germany. I don't imagine this is anything like the one her father used.

Call me crazy, but that looks as if it would be really simple to build. It is basically a box with a wedge shape attached to the front of it to push the snow to the sides of the road. I have lumber that I could use sitting around and could make a scaled down version. What I don't have is a horse. This is where the crazy part comes in...I started wondering why I couldn't pull it down the driveway with our van!

I don't know if I'll actually try it but I think it's a cool idea and would probably work. The only problem that I have read related by old-timers who remember seeing them used was that they tended to wander back and forth behind the team as the snow drifts on each side pushed it sideways.

It would be fun to try it but I suppose it would let the neighbors know what kind of a nut moved into the neighborhood before I've had a chance to introduce myself!

Tapping Day - Saturday!

I've continued to watch the weather reports and have been reading the messages on Mapletrader.com from sugarmakers out there. Everyone is excited and itching to get the season started. There are reports that a few people have already begun tapping in West Virginia and Vermont.

Although the temperature this morning was -2 degrees, there is a major warm front coming through this weekend. Our forecasts are predicting highs in the 40's for at least three days starting on Saturday. From what I have read many sugarmakers in Michigan and Pennsylvania will be jumping in and I plan to be among them!

My plans for surgarin' this spring are crude but will hopefully be successful. The steam table pan that I purchased arrived yesterday. Tonight I'm going to go move my old woodstove to our farm and start getting things set up out behind the house.

If all goes well, we will have taps set and sap dripping by Saturday afternoon! We'll take lots of pictures and post them to the website under: Farm Tour\Sugarbush.

Warming Trend!

This morning's 7 degree temperature did little to dampen my rising anticipation of spring. If you have a look at my Sugarbush page on the website (under "Tour the Farm"), you will see that I have been carefully tracking the daily highs and lows.

Since mid-January, we have been seeing an upward warming trend. It is true that there have been a few dips back into bitterly cold territory, but the trend is there just the same. We have had two days above freezing and are looking to have a third this coming weekend.

I am watching the charts for the best time to tap the maple trees. The best condition for sap flow is daily highs at least in the upper 30's and nights in the 20's. Part of the risk of tapping too early is that a return to colder weather will stop the sap flow and the cells in the tapped holes will begin the process of sealing up before the season is through. The risk of starting too late is that warmer temperatures of March and early April will cause the sap to get "buddy" and unusable as the composition changes to stimulate the opening of leaf buds.

If nothing else, the rush is really just my excitement to get out of the confines of the house and start doing something on the farm!