Finally a day that feels like early March. Actually it’s been warming a few days now but we’re finally hitting stride after what has been an unusually cool winter. Not that we had a lot of snow, but the two small snows we had lingered for days as temperatures barely pushed past freezing.
In the woods, I’ve got my sap buckets set out on the maples. Been making syrup for more than a week now, we probably have a solid quart of maple syrup— that would mean I’ve gathered at least 40 quarts of sap. There’s a 40 to one ratio of sap to syrup, so that means we’ve been doing a lot of boiling.
Process pretty easy: bore a hole into maple tree about two inches, insert some sort of spigot or pout to catch and direct the sap into a bucket. gather sap at the end of the day and boil it down.That’s all there is to making maple syrup. This year I tapped five or six trees.
Over the weekend the ground actually thawed enough that I could fire up my old tiller and turn my garden sports. Not much of a gardener really, but it gives me a real sense of reward to sow a few seeds each spring, then watch the grow. And the harvest — no matter what it is, when you grow something yourself — it always tastes better.
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