I’m doing something extremely dangerous here on The Farm right now. I’m multi-tasking while I boil syrup. This makes me more anxious than fending off roosters.

Not sure how much you know about working with maple syrup. When you finally get it to a stage where it is boiled down on the stove, it becomes very volatile. Not like nitroglycerin volatile (though that would be fun) but more like boiling milk. One minute it is happily bubbling on the stove, the next it is rising up out of the pot and oozing across the landscape like a creature in a SciFi novel.

So, I’m writing a blog, watching my almost finished pot boil on the grill outside the window, sterilizing jars, and filtering sap… all while the 2 year old sleeps. At any minute something could change drastically and all Hell will break loose.

Yes, we’re up to our eyeballs in Maple Season! While 40 taps was exciting, and 60 taps was a little overzealous, Dad has decided that 100 taps might just remind us why we’re called The Accidental Farm. So far I think we have something like 40 gallons boiled down with over 80 to go. And we’re collecting more every day. Let me remind you that we’re still looking at a 40:1 ratio. With the 2 days of boiling it took to get 40 down, we only get 1 gallon of syrup. Fool’s Gold.

Maple sap will spoil, so it is a race to boil as much as possible before this happens. Logically we should have calculated our rate of boil and then tapped only that many trees. But that would require logic. This is The Accidental Farm. We’re fresh out of logic.

Instead we scramble about madly boiling, boiling, boiling and when we feel desperation hit a peak, we run out to the beer supply store and start buying up all the supplies to make the remaining sap into beer. Now that is a 1:1 ratio, with 5 gallons of sap needed for every case – case and 1/2 of beer. This is how we become The Most Popular Farm.

I can’t help but think of my sister, Shannon, every time I peek out the window expecting to see maple syrup boiling over. Right now she is 9 months pregnant and she is due the first week of April. This same week, her husband will be in NYC working, one of her midwives will be on vacation and I (her labor coach) will be in Boston. Much like the sap, I feel like if I look away for an instant Shannon is going to boil into labor and then there will be this sticky mess because I wasn’t paying attention. Luckily the end result there should be a beautiful healthy baby and not a lost batch of sugary goodness all over the floor. Well, there might be some goodness spilled on the floor in any case.

In Other News

I’m quickly learning about beekeeping by fire. The sun warmed up and we took out my honey supers to air them out. Within minutes there were honeybees all over the place: in the supers, collecting sawdust from our Field of Fallen Soldiers, picking up birdseed. Innocently, I thought letting the bees take their fill of old honey from the equipment was a good idea. Now, I figure out that perhaps I’m infecting the incoming colony. Oops.

This Sunday we are scheduled to pick up the rest of the hive equipment and possibly the other bees. We still don’t know for sure if they have survived, but it is possible that all might have turned out okay (special thanks to Ms. Miller’s 2nd grade class at St. Thomas School for the extra prayers!). I woke up this morning realizing that:

A. I have no idea how to move a hive full of live bees

B. I have no protective clothing to move a hive full of live bees.

Cross your fingers. This could go down as one hell of a t-shirt slogan.

Incidentally, we have finally obtained our tax id number and are setting up our Cafe Press online store where we will sell The Accidental Farm Shameless Merchandise. Get excited!

Here are some photos from the last couple of weeks: me and the girls starting our first seeds — broccoli (to eat the sprouts) and lettuce (which we’ll just harvest from the box), stump arts and crafts, and Rocky gets released back into the wild (aka the rain barrel)!

Remind me next time to tell you about our race to roast 70 pounds of garlic and how we almost blew up the barn.

Until then… love and stickiness,
Mikko

Tags: Farming, Maple Syrup, Winter

Here are pics from the first weekend of tapping…

The first thing you need to know about maple tapping is that it is virtually impossible to do without a beer.
I call the following photo series: “Yeah, We’d Tap That”

Once the trees are drilled and the taps placed, then we hang the buckets.

Some get one..others get two.

And some, have nicer buckets than others…

NICE CANS! (Had to be said.)
The way that we collect the sap is to drag it out of the woods in a wheelbarrow, with a tiny cat in each bucket.

This is after just one day of sitting on the tree:

And now, the shining star of our season… our new Leader Evaporator!

An evaporator is a combination wood stove and compartmentalized boiling pan that facilitates the boiling down of the sap. Much better than the bottom of a crate MacGuyvered as a boiling pan.

The evaporator was put into the greenhouse and vented through the roof.

The sap is brought into the greenhouse in water carboys, then collected into garbage cans, then loaded into the evaporator about 5 gallons at a time.

I’m so proud of how much we have accomplished! And all of our limbs are still intact! So far. (Knock on wood.)

Now… can we find this boy a date?

Tags: Family, Farming, Maple Syrup, Winter