Sugaring Weekends

Jeff had the brilliant idea to try and make his own maple syrup ever since he saw the sugar maple trees on Zach & Rachel’s Farm.  So he researched the process in more detail, ordered the necessary supplies (tree taps, hoses) from Amazon…yes, they have that too! And we bought some more food grade buckets with lids.  Then Jeff and Lars tapped 5 trees, hooked up the hoses and started collecting sap in the 5 gallon buckets.  They checked the buckets every day and over the course of 2 weeks collected nearly 100 gallons of sap.

The first weekend we used our pig roaster, which has a stainless steel trough, to boil down the sap until the 50 gallons were reduced to about 3 gallons.  We transferred the 3 gallons to our largest stainless steel pot and reduced those even further, to about 4 quarts.  We used a thermometer to measure the exact temperature of the sap at all times.  Our water boiled at 211 F, (we double checked it to calibrate the thermometer), and we boiled the sap until it reached 218 degrees.  After this, we transferred the syrup into 2 half gallon jars and let it cool down and settle, to allow the clear syrup to separate from the “sand” (the left over mineral residue).  We used our wine equipment to “rack” the clear syrup off the residue.

The following week, we collected the sap more frequently, and all of it was boiled down in our large pot.  All that yielded another gallon.

Chickens Hatched!

In textbooks style, our chicken eggs hatched exactly on day #19.  We have had fertilized chicken eggs in an incubator on our kitchen island most of February.  Just in case we might forget, Jeff labeled the incubator with the start date 🙂  Throughout the month, Jeff and Lars have been checking the content of the eggs with a very bright flashlight – watching the embryos grow and grow into tiny chicks.

Yesterday, the first chick emerged, and as of this evening, they all are officially hatched!!  The chicks are now in an old tin washtub, lined with old sweatshirts under a rather intense heat lamp.  In my kitchen!  They have water and chick feed as well; and a thermometer, to make sure they are just warm enough.  Seriously thinking of changing the name of this blog to “the chronicles of the farmer’s wife”.  Chicks in the kitchen…really…

A Visit to Ag Progress Days

Lars and Tina spent the day at Ag Progress Days near State College – something we do almost every year.  Lucky for us, Zach was there as well through his work and he spent his lunch time with us checking out tractors and dreaming 🙂

As always, there were lots of things to see, from machinery to trial crop plots, animals, weed identification quizzes, flower beds and potato variety exhibits.  And of course the agricultural museum…and the honey ice cream from the PA Bee Keepers Association (yum!)

And my favorite – the manure vacuum (really??):

Firewood Clean-up

Cleaning up the future driveway continues, now that the snow melted somewhat.  Zach came to visit this weekend and chainsawed the large tree trunks into firewood pieces.  Lars and Tina could hardly keep up with moving the cut wood and stacking up the brush pieces onto a nice pile for burning later.

1st Steps of a New Driveway

One of our goals for this year is getting a real driveway to access the barn.  Turns out that this is not as easy of a process as we initially thought.  Since we are located on a state road, PennDOT has to approve the access and verify sufficient sight distances in both directions.  The first step was to get an engineering firm to help draft plans to submit to PennDOT, and also contracting with an excavating company to clear out trees and tree stumps to gain access.  Last month both of those projects got started- and ever since then, it has been snowing, so progress has stalled for now.