Annoying The Cranes

By far, the largest bird to return to the farm this spring has been the Sandhill Cranes. They are common in this area for some reason. I remember the first time I came upon one after moving to Michigan and being awestruck by their sheer size and prehistoric sounding calls. They are four foot tall and have a seven foot wingspan.

They are a common sight at this time of year in our front yard and fields around the house. They stalk along on their stilt legs looking like Jim Henson creations. Much to the irritation of the nesting geese, they also wade around in the pond looking for fish.

I made this video in an attempt to show how large they are and how amazing they sound. They don't seem to have much fear of us and generally go about their business as long as we keep a respectful distance. I deliberately annoyed them by walking slowly in their direction so they would move and fly away. Please excuse the shaky camera work!

Pasting

You had to know that sooner or later we would get down to the more earthy aspects of farming. Well, today's topic will certainly take us there. The topic is a little problem that I am having with our newly hatched chicks called "pasting".

This problem is apparently common during the first few weeks of life for chickens. The problem is that their poop sticks in their feathers around their "vents" and begins to build up. Unless addressed it eventually builds up into a little mass that dries like concrete and seals off their vents so they can no longer use the bathroom at all. Left in that constipated state, they stop eating and drinking and will soon die.

To address the problem, I am having to wipe their little butts with a wet paper towel. They enjoy it even less than I do and squawk loudly until I finish and put them down. Because the material is so hard it often takes way more time than either of us would like but unless I do it, we will lose some of the chicks.

This problem is supposed to go away once they begin feathering out in the next few weeks. I certainly hope so! This is like having to change a bunch of tiny little baby diapers each day.

I'll spare you the pictures this time!

Beekeeper's Conference

I spent all day yesterday attending the Southeastern Michigan Beekeeper's Association conference. It was held at a college in Livonia and was well-attended by several hundred beekeepers from around the region. They had outstanding guest speakers and visiting beekeepers from as far away as Germany and Africa.

I attended a couple of interesting and alarming lectures by researchers studying the serious problems that are threatening to wipe out the honeybee. A fascinating talk by a scientist who has devoted her entire life to researching mites led me to realize that beekeeping has radically changed and become much more complicated in the twenty years that I had been away from it.

The daunting array of new practices and measures that everyone is having to follow in order to keep their colonies from being killed off by varroa and tracheal mites found me wondering if I still wanted to keep bees at all. Luckily, that feeling passed as I attended some educational classes and listened to seasoned old-timers spell out how they handle all of these issues.

The most alarming talk was an update on the status of research into Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Beginning in 2006, beekeepers started reporting that large numbers of their hives were simply empty of all but a small number of bees. The colonies have been vanishing, often striking large professional operations and wiping out as much as 90% of their colonies. The researchers seem very far from understanding what is happening and believe that it is being caused by a combination of factors such as pesticides, parasites and disease.

During the conference, I signed up for a year-long hands-on beekeeping course being taught by a team of seasoned beekeepers. Once or twice a month for the next year we will be working with the hives in a large apiary in Livonia. I anticipate learning a great deal from these people and greatly boosting my confidence that I know how to handle all of the challenges facing beekeepers today. My first class will be held this afternoon.

A Great Big Ray Of Sunshine!

I have deliberately not mentioned matters of personal finance on this blog. I feel that it is mostly outside of the scope of what I want this website and blog to be about. At the same time, our finances obviously have a big impact on our ability to pursue our farming aspirations.

As you may have gathered from the website (http://www.portageriverfarm.com/), our income is primarily dependant on my job as an engineer in the automotive industry. Unless you have been living in a cave you are probably aware that the auto companies have been in a horrible state. Thus far, I have survived many layoffs and my company is now a fraction of the size that it was a year ago. On top of the anxiety of constantly worrying about job security, I have also lost many friends among my coworkers who have been let go.

As I'm sure you already know, the earliest phase of the current economic downturn was a collapse in housing values. That drop in prices back in July of 2008 put this property and the accompanying farming dreams within our reach. We decided to take the calculated risk of going ahead with the purchase when we still had not sold our old house. Little did we know that the economic tailspin had barely begun!

We have had little luck in attracting interest in purchasing our old home. The tightening of credit by the banks combined with the overall uncertainty that everyone has been feeling has left us in these frightening times trying our best to cover mortgages for both properties. We have been managing pretty well but there was always the specter that a job loss on my part would pull the rug out from under the entire thing.

I also had some trepidation about selling the old house when the market was so low. It is true that we would be in a far better cash flow state to have our burden down to one mortgage. At the same time, we would have had to give away all of the equity in the house to bargain hunters in this buyer's market. We decided that we would prefer to rent the house until conditions improve.

My wonderfully good news is that Friday evening we finally signed a couple and their grown son to rent our old house. They began moving in yesterday morning following a marathon cleaning session on my part that lasted until 3:30am. It is such a relief to have that finally taken care of and to have somebody staying in that house so I don't have to constantly worry about it being broken into. Let's just hope that the people will turn out to be good tenants too!

They're Here!

On Wednesday morning I received a call from the post office. Even before the woman on the other end of the line had spoken, the sounds of tiny birds cheeping in the background gave away the purpose of the call. She enquired as to the best time for them to deliver our box of day-old chicks and we coordinated our schedules.



The appointed hour arrived to find me pacing the living room and watching the driveway. When the delivery was finally made, I thanked the driver and rushed downstairs in order to open the package in the laundry room where we have set up the brood box and heat lamp. As I cut the bands and bent back the lid I was at once sorry that the children weren't home to see them and also kind of glad that they weren't since I wasn't sure if the chicks had all come through their shipping ordeal alive.



Upon removing the lid I found twenty seven perfectly healthy and perfectly terrorized little chicks all crammed together in a small bunch in one corner of the box. As you can see from the picture, they are adorable as can be! I picked them up one by one and placed them into the brood box.



For the first couple of hours they just stood around cheeping very loudly. I could hear them all of the way to the front door as I rushed around the house taking care of some chores. With each pass through the living room our dog Finn would come up to me with a comically puzzled look on his face. He would look at me and then glance around the room while cocking his ears and working his expressive eyebrows. When he returned his gaze to me, the canine message was perfectly clear: "Don't you hear that? What the heck is going on! Why are you acting so excited? Wag, wag, wag!"



After a little while the chicks began to quiet down and began exploring their new home. One by one, I placed them at the feed and watering troughs. Immediately they began eating and drinking with gusto. After a few more hours of voracious feeding they settled down for a group nap in the warmth of the heat lamp.



Of all of the events of that day, the one that stands out for me as the best was getting to watch the children's faces as they saw the chicks for the first time. In turn they lit up with beaming grins and their eyes showed the emotions of coming upon the most adorable sight that they had ever seen. It was as if they had entered a room to discover that all of their beloved stuffed animals had come to life!

Brood Box

On the evening before the chicks where scheduled to arrive, I made a brood box to serve as their new home. It is a little hard to tell the scale in the photographs. The lid is a 30" square.

The box has a fine mesh bottom to give the chicks something to stand on. The mesh also lets their droppings fall through to prevent them from getting covered in their own waste. This helps to prevent disease.

The lid at the top has a large hole to allow a heat lamp to shine through to keep the chicks warm. I stapled chicken wire across the opening just in case the dogs decide that a chick would be a good snack or playtoy.

I thought that the brood box would be big enough for all of the chicks but now I'm not so sure. My intention is for them to remain in there until at least mid-April when the weather warms up. If they grow too quickly, I may find myself making a second box!

And the winner is...

I'm a big fan of spreadsheets. Any time that I plan to make a major purchase or reach a decision, I create a spreadsheet to evaluate all of the options and rank them as to how they stack up against my requirements. This tends to drive Janet crazy since she somehow has the ability to make decisions quickly and without a need to analyze things to death. Since I don't have that ability, I created a spreadsheet to select the breed of chicken we are going to raise.

Our intentions for raising chickens have evolved a bit. Originally, we thought that we would simply buy chicks in the spring, fatten them up, slaughter them all and continue filling up the freezer in this way until fall. After I realized that we would get few eggs this way, I decided instead to establish a small breeder flock to keep year-round. From them we would get eggs and raise some of the offspring for slaughtering as well. This method will also help us avoid constantly paying the hatchery to supply us with chicks.

I started by gathering information on twenty four "dual purpose" breeds of chickens. Dual purpose breeds are used for both meat and eggs. I evaluated them according to the following list (from most important to least): winter hardiness, weight at maturity, growth rate, egg size, behavior (easily handled, flighty, aggressive, noisy, etc.), skin color, laying frequency, and brooding tendency. After tallying up the results a clear winner stood out, the Orpington. The second runner up was the Jersey Giant closely followed by the Plymouth Rock.

The Orpington is an English breed that was developed in 1886 by crossing Minorcas, Langshans and Plymouth Rocks. They are considered a heavy chicken, weighing in at about 8lbs. They are covered with fluffy feathers that insulate them well against the cold and give them a stocky puff-ball appearance. They are a very docile and quiet breed, considered very suitable for families with small children.

The Orpingtons are also said to be more intelligent than many other chicken breeds. They can be taught to recognize individual names and come when called. They are said to be easy to handle and affectionate birds. Each hen will lay 110 - 160 light brown medium to large eggs per year.

This breed was thought to be unsuitable for use in this country due to its white skin. Americans traditionally prefer yellow-skinned chickens as opposed to the Brits who prefer white. We decided that the skin color really wasn't an issue for us and figure that they will just look like little turkeys once dressed for the cooking pot.

Having made our decision, I called the hatchery and placed an order for twenty-five chicks. They are shipping them out to us today so I assume we will have them sometime tomorrow. We have been busily preparing for their arrival, buying feed, a heat lamp, a waterer and other equipment. Tonight I plan to build a brood box that will be their home for the next month or so.

We are all very excited with the anticipation of opening up a box of peeping yellow chicks. I can only imagine the troubles we may get into in the future over the ultimate purpose of getting the birds. Maybe when I open the box I'll say, "Mmm! Chicks! Should we eat them now or wait until they grow up?!"

"It's So Noisy Here!"

Prior to our move to this farm, we lived in the city of Ypsilanti. We lived on a little postage stamp of a yard in a little brick ranch house surrounded by a sea of little brick ranch houses. Our house was located two blocks from a major freeway and the roar of it permeated our existence. We also had neighbors who would sit in their cars late into the night and listen to their car stereos until 2 or 3 in the morning. Those cars sat in the driveway a dozen or so feet on the other side of the wall from our headboard!

Since our move, I have been reveling in the serene quiet of the countryside. Whenever I am outside I am always listening to the birds and any other sounds that come to me. I have been shocked at how easily I can pick up conversations from my neighbors' houses that are a quarter mile away. When our dog Finn barks to be let back into the house, the sound rolls and echoes through our woods and back again like a shock wave disturbing the tranquility of the world around us.

In late winter, I happened to be walking through the woods with my seven-year-old son Aidan. We were intently listening to the sounds of the nuthatches and woodpeckers as they flitted from tree to tree around us. It was then that he looked up at me and said something that I just couldn't wrap my mind around. "Dad, it's so noisy here!"

I remember expressing my dismay at his statement. "How can you say that?" "It's amazingly quiet here!" His statement made no sense to me. He didn't offer an explanation that I could grasp and I gradually forgot all about it as I immersed myself in the pleasure of our walk in the winter woods.

It wasn't until Aidan had uttered the same phrase to my wife and I several more times that it finally dawned on me what he was saying. Aidan has lived his whole life in the sonic shadow of the freeway. To him that background noise was normal and it drowned out or at least diminished everything else in our surroundings, especially distant bird songs and conversations.

Now I understand that his experience of having the background noise turned down is one of suddenly being conscious of so many noises around him. The birds, dogs, people and cars out on the gravel road are all so much louder to his perception than they have been in the past. While I am confident that the overall sound level is much quieter here, the individual sounds against a background of relative silence make them seem so much louder.

So I guess I have to agree that it is noisy here but it's the kind of racket that is music to my ears!

St. Paddy's Day

On Saturday, Aidan, Sean and I went into Pinckney to watch the St. Patrick's Day festivities. Pinckney, our new hometown, is about two miles north of us. It is a friendly little country town that reminds me of the town in southern Ohio where I grew up. Pinckney has about 2,400 residents which makes it just a little bigger than McArthur.





The heart of Pinckney is a little downtown district that is barely two blocks long. The storefronts face a little park that forms the central town square. It has several nice restaurants, a bakery, a hardware store, a quilting shop, a public library, a pilates studio, a pharmacy, a grocery store, a couple of gas stations and a car wash. They even have a McDonald's and a Wendy's!





On this particular Saturday, the residents of the town and the surrounding countryside were out in force for the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade. The festivities were kicked off with some traditional Irish step dancing by four local girls at the park pavilion. Afterwards, there was a bed race down Main Street.





The main event was the parade. We loaded ourselves down with some hotdogs from a street vendor and some souvenirs from table set up by an Irish gifts shop from a nearby town. We sat on the curb and watched the entrants go by which included the local 4-H club on horseback, the girl scout troop, the 4th grade class of the town's Catholic school, the local Rolling Thunder motorcycle club, representatives from the Michigan National Guard in their Humvee (Aidan liked that), a few politicians, a number of veteran's groups, the Michigan Military Mom's and the town firetruck.





For me, the highlight of the parade was the Scottish Pipe Band from Flint. They were smartly dressed in their kilts and military uniforms complete with swords and bagpipes. They made an impressive sound as they came down the little street with bagpipes blaring.





Once it was over we made our way back to our van and home again to return to our farm work. It felt nice to get out for a bit and enjoy the small-town atmosphere. It reminded me that I have spent too much of my life leading an anonymous existence in large towns and cities. I look forward to getting to know some of these people better once our children transfer into the local schools next fall.

Radon Test Results

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that we had a radon issue when we moved into this house. The house inspector tested the air and said that it read 11.4. You are supposed to do something about it if it is over 4.

Therefore I installed a big pipe through my house from my sump to carry the radon gas out through the roof. A vent fan in the attic now runs all of the time and is supposed to be depressurizing the soil beneath our house. There was some question in my mind as to whether I was getting enough suction since it only measures 0.9" water column.

Last week I bought a radon gas monitor and it has been sampling the air in the basement ever since. It reveals that the readings are down to 0.9. That seems like a big improvement from 11.4. When I get some spare time I may seal up the system a little more to try to improve the numbers. In the mean time it is at least at a much safer level.

"Trust Us To..."

I was away from home until late on Thursday evening, arriving a little after midnight. Everyone was nestled in and fast asleep as I made my usual rounds to check on them and deliver the expected goodnight kisses. As I was trudging off to bed, I realized that I had neglected to freeze the day's batch of maple sap. It was still sitting on the stove and now needed to be reboiled.

I sighed wearily with the realization that I had to stay up for another thirty minutes to give the sap time to boil. Turning the knob, I heard the familiar "tick, tick, tick" of the pilot on the burner beneath the pot but the expected "woof" as the gas caught the flame did not come. I soon realized that there was no gas!

This new home is my first experience with LP gas. Everywhere else that I have lived has been piped into the vast network of natural gas lines and I have never had to pay any attention to it before. Ironically, our farm is bisected by a 900psi natural gas pipeline that runs from the Texas panhandle clear across the country to a storage facility in mid-Michigan. On its way it passes within 300 feet of our front porch.

Going down to the basement, I checked on the furnace and the water heater. Sure enough, both were making futile attempts to complete their tasks while neither had the accompanying blue glow that showed their efforts were succeeding. Next I headed outside to have a look at the gage on the "pig", the 400 gallon gas tank that sits beside our house. Peering at the gage with flashlight in hand, I could see that it was bone dry. I returned to the living room to place a call to the gas company.

To understand how I was feeling at that moment, you need to know that we are signed up for the "always full" option for our gas supply. By selecting this option and paying the corresponding monthly rate, they are supposed to regularly visit and top off our tank so that we never have to worry about it. As I waited on the phone my mind kept returning to the image of their billboards which read "Trust us to keep the heat on for you."

The emergency operator for the gas company office in Kansas City was very friendly and apologetic. She said that she would notify our local gas driver on night duty and that he would be here as soon as possible. She tried to convince me that I should wake everyone and leave the house immediately in case there had been a gas leak.

I thanked her for the advice and said I would check again for any odd smells and heed her warning if it seemed necessary. The fact that I didn't smell any gas and the anticipation of the tongue-lashing that I would take if I attempted to make them all get up to go sit in the car in the middle of the night was enough to convince me that I should leave them in peace. Instead, I resolved that would I stay awake and monitor the situation until the gas truck arrived.

Roughly twenty minutes after hanging up from my first call, my cell phone rang. On the other end a very sleepy driver asked me if I needed him to come out with the gas truck immediately. It was clear that he was praying that I would tell him that it could wait until morning but I was insistent. In response, he sighed and said he would be here as soon as he could.

As I waited, I entertained myself by watching video excerpts of performances by comedian Lewis Black on YouTube. He is the angry commentator who frequently appears on the Jon Stewart show. If you don't mind the frequent f-bombs included in his delivery, he can be very funny and insightful. The time passed easily as I snickered at his angry protests about everything from bottled water to politics.

The gas truck finally came backing up the drive at 3:30am. The driver, now fully awake, was very friendly as he went about his work. He came inside to check that all of the pilots ignited properly before bidding me goodnight and steering his lumbering truck back out our pot-holed drive.

My head hit the pillow at about 4:30am for a short nap before I had to get up for work the next morning.

We're Being Robbed!

Friday was incredibly warm. In the afternoon, Janet called me from somewhere out in the brushy field to the front of our property. She was enjoying the nice weather and her new knee-high boots with a tromp out to the cottonwoods to see how much water was standing there. She told me that I should try to get out of work a little early to enjoy the warm day. Of course I couldn't, but I suggested that we take a walk around the farm when I got home.

Shortly after I finally managed to arrive, Janet, Aidan and I headed out for a stroll. We talked about our plans. I showed them where I wanted to build the barn, the woodshop and the chicken coop. We talked about the berry patch location, where the orchard would go, how much of the field we would try to get plowed up this year. All in all, it was a great little tour and long overdue.

One portion of our walk took us up the driveway past the beehive. My eyes happened to detect a familiar motion where none should have been. I swerved away from the others to investigate and discovered a cloud of bees at the front of our hive, busily coming and going as they did all last summer. The problem is that Aidan and I had discovered that the bees had all died in the late fall!

My mind cast around for an explanation for what I was seeing. I briefly entertained the thought that our poor little hive had somehow survived and was now stirring itself into action again. I recalled that only this morning I had mailed off a check to the local beekeepers association for the purchase of a new 3lb package of bees. I thought, "Oh great, now what am I going to do? I'm going to have to come up with a second hive for the new bees before they arrive since our existing hive isn't empty afterall!"

Then the other side of my mind began to recall how very dead the bees had looked when I had last checked them. I leaned down and took a close look at the bees that were pouring in and out of the hive. They were actually a mix of bees. Some appeared to be the usual domesticated Italian honeybees but others were much darker in color. Those darker bees were probably from a wild hive somewhere nearby.

Then it clicked. We were being robbed! I had left the honey in the combs assuming that it would be fine in the freezing weather. I had been planning to extract what I could of it before installing my new package bees when they arrived in April. Now that the weather had suddenly warmed up, every bee in the neighborhood was out to steal our honey!

Since the sun was setting, I knew the bees would soon have to return to their own hives. I left them to have their fun at our expense for a short while longer as we continued our farm tour. I even managed to forget about the crime that was being committed for a while as Aidan capered along telling me about his day.

Around 11pm this evening I headed out to the hive with my wheelbarrow and flashlight. I probably looked a bit like a thief myself. After knocking on the hive and receiving no buzzing in reply, I opened it up and peered inside. The vast majority of the honey was intact and the hive was otherwise empty. I loaded the whole heavy thing up, wheeled it ponderously around to the back of the house and shoved it into the basement door where the bees would never find it.

In the morning, Aidan and I will uncap the comb, spin out the honey and package it up in bottles. In the meantime, I am going to wander off to bed, all the while doing my best to shove the thought out of my mind of the hive somehow raising itself from the dead yet again only to find itself locked in my basement!

Chicken Talk

Etymology has always fascinated me. I could read about the origins of words and phrases all day. Lately I have been studying everything that there is to know about chickens in preparation for our upcoming coop building project and I have been surprised at the number of common phrases that we use that relate to chickens!

Apparently chickens are very hierarchical. From an early age they begin squabbling until they have worked out where each of them stands in the dominance structure of the flock. I have heard the term "pecking order" many times relating to dogs and people but never connected the fact that it originated with this behavior in chickens.

The hierarchy in the flock is usually topped by a rooster. In the case of a flock with a very young or very old rooster, the top of the hierarchy will be held by an older hen instead. In this case, the female dominated rooster is referred to as "hen-pecked".

Roosters have an elaborate set of gestures and postures that they use to convey dominance and to challenge other roosters or potentially dangerous strangers. One of these postures involves the rooster subtly moving in a sideways direction toward the offending individual while seeming to stare fixedly at something on the ground. All the while the rooster is actually staring down his opponent with the one eye facing him. This behavior is referred to as being "cock-eyed".

This last one is mostly my own conjecture. I have been learning that chickens have a wide range of sounds that they use to communicate. Among these sounds is one that a chicken will make when they see a large bird flying overhead. In that case the chicken sounds the alarm for the flock to take cover by literally shouting "HAWK!"

That leads me to think about that odd sounding English word that we use for those winged predators. I have checked the etymological explanations in the dictionary and really don't see anything that would dispute the possibility that some early ancestor or ours may have begun referring to the birds going after her chickens by the term suggested by the squawking livestock themselves. Hawk! Hawk!

I may be wrong, but I kind of like the notion that we might be carrying at least one word in the modern English language that is a borrow-word from chicken-ish!

Danged Little Varmit!

The last few days have brought us wonderfully high sap runs. Each evening when I get home from work, I head out into the woods to check the taps and carry the sap back to the house. Two nights ago as I was approaching the last tree, I noticed that one of the sap sacs was empty while the rest were full.

A quick inspection revealed that a small hole near the bottom had allowed all of the sap to run out onto the ground. I went back to the house, retrieved a new sac and replaced it. I figured that I must have snagged the bag on a bramble while I was emptying it on the previous day.

Last night as I was completing my rounds, I found the same bag in the same condition, dripping the precious liquid on the ground again! This time I looked a little more carefully and realized that the punctures were in pairs! Little rodent teeth had worked their way along the bottom of the sac until they managed to pierce it.

I had read that squirrels have been known to bite holes in these sacs to get a taste of the sweet liquid. They also reportedly will nibble twigs on maple trees in the early spring to do the same thing. Luckily I already knew a remedy for the problem.

I headed back to the house to retrieve another replacement sac. This time I covered the bottom edge with duct tape to make it more difficult to puncture and so that it would taste unpleasant.

This evening's tour of the woods found the new sac intact and bulging with sap. I didn't see any evidence of gnawing this time so I'm not sure if it deterred the critter or not.

I guess this is one of the drawbacks of using plastic bags instead of buckets!

Sugarin': Bad News and Good News

Mildly Bad News:

As it turns out, the previous post should have been labeled "Two Major Improvements". My attempt to fix my syrup filtering aggravations had mixed results. It is true that the thin liquid that had not made it quite to concentration went through the filter material much more quickly. The problem is that the next morning, Sean picked up one of the syrup bottles and noted that it was a little bit cloudy. That cloudiness is slowly drifting to the bottom of the bottles and it won't affect the taste of the syrup, but it shows that my idea didn't work out so well.

Since then I've also noticed that my first batch of syrup is considerably thicker than the second. That was caused by my failure to reduce the heat below the pot and overshooting the specific gravity measurement. That is probably why I had such a hard time filtering it in the first place. In any case, I'm learning something with each mistake. For the next round I will go back to filtering after the boiling is completed and hopefully having the correct concentration will make it easier.

(Sorry if this is too technical to be very interesting. I get that way sometimes!)

Really Good News!:

As you may have read, I calculated the sugar concentration of the sap from my first run of syrup and came up with 1.07% sugar. That meant that I would need to boil down 73 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.

This most recent run yielded a whopping 1/2 gallon of syrup from 22 gallons of sap. That was a much greater yield than I had expected and indicates that it would only take 44 gallons of sap to make a full gallon. That puts the sugar concentration of those 22 gallons at a much more respectable 1.96%.

Sugar maples generally have a sugar concentration of 2-2.5%. From my previous results, I had assumed that we mostly had silver and red maples. These improved numbers are a good indication that we probably do have some of the prized sugar maples afterall. This summer, I plan to positively identify the species and we'll know for sure. In the mean time, it appears that our yield of syrup will be better than I was anticipating after the first run.

Three Major Improvements

This has been a weekend of steam and woodsmoke. The sap started boiling at 3:30pm on Saturday (we took the kids to a movie first). I set the sap aside and knocked off for the night at about 10:30pm. Sunday morning I had it boiling again by about 11am and have been at it non-stop until now. It is 1am on Monday morning and it is finally very nearly syrup.

This time around I achieved what I consider three major improvements to the process:

1) I spent some time modifying the woodstove to better function as an evaporator. I removed the old lid and bent the metal until the steam pan could sit fully down flush with the surface and level. This change made the task of evaporating so much easier! The pan could now hold many more gallons of sap and no longer required constant vigilance to prevent scorching. It also effectively reduced the height of the firebox thus increasing the heat directed into the pan and improving the efficiency of firewood useage.

2) I figured out the secret to filtering the syrup. During the last run I waited until the syrup had reached the final sugar concentration before attempting to filter it. The thick liquid took FOREVER to drip through the wool cloth and I had to reheat it again before bottling. This time I filtered the syrup before it was fully thickened. The resulting syrup is just as clear and it was so much easier to pour it through the filter when it was still thin.

3) During the last run, I had too much heat under the syrup during the final minutes of boiling and am sure that I overshot the specific gravity before I had turned it off. This time, I crept up on the final sugar concentration and reduced the heat gradually until it was just simmering. As a result, I was able to control the quality of the syrup and get exactly the concentration I wanted.

These changes led to a much more pleasant and controlled sugaring experience. Now if I could only find a way to do it in a few hours instead of a couple of days I'd be all set! The five bottles of syrup from this run are shown in the picture. The bottle of store bought syrup is there for comparison purposes. Syrup is graded by color with the lighter color being the better product. You can judge for yourself.