sugaring
sastyk | April 2, 2012We're very tiny maple producers, and only on a home scale. I boil the syrup down on the back of our woodstove, and collect the syrup from old plastic buckets. Our operation is stone-age compared to our more serious neighbors. We don't have much of a sugar bush - most of our land was open 30 years ago, and we have only a moderate number of maple trees and many of those too small to tap. In twenty years, it should be respectable, though, as maples replace many of the other first growth trees. If, of course, it isn't too warm for them.
This year we tapped for only two weeks - the warm…
sastyk | February 11, 2011"Did you look at the forecast?" "Is this it?" "Should we get them out?"
My children keep asking, and I keep telling them that I think so, but that no one can know for sure. We are talking of the change in the weather, slated to begin today, warming us up from the last wave of bitter cold with night temperatures last night around -12 (we hit -29 earlier this winter, so that's pretty balmy), to days in the 40s (gasp, and maybe even near 50) next week, while nights are just below freezing.
It is possible, of course, that the warm spell will turn and go south, although the predictions are…