We’ve got 38 maple trees (48 taps) and 10 black walnut trees (12 taps) – the first collection was 38 gallons of maple sap and 16 gallons of black walnut sap.
Boiling
Not buzzards yet!
Looking at the calendar, these are clearly turkey vultures. The spell to become buzzards won’t be cast until the 15th!
Collecting Sap
We are hiking the woods collecting maple sap … and we’ve got our maple helpers!
Cool Sunset
Half Tapped
We got the trees at the top of the driveway (12), the ones at the bottom (2), and the ones along the river (9) tapped today. 23 trees tapped. Tomorrow, we’ll get the back woods (17 trees), the black walnuts at the farm (three or four), plus the new trees at the farmhouse (no idea — at least one huge black walnut and one huge sugar maple). That’s around 23 more. Which means we are halfway done tapping!
Although there is one up the hill at the bottom of the driveway and two more up a hill along the river that we don’t generally tap (fetching sap is dangerous, especially as the ground thaws and it is muddy!). There are also the two maples by the house that never produce sap, the enormous one by the river that I was very disappointed to learn also does not produce sap, and the big sugar maple in the front yard that we are letting recover. Seven untapped trees.
Stuffler Sandwiches
I am trying a new approach to making stuffler sandwiches – pre-forming a circle so there’s more stuffing and less dough. Still getting a lot of dough, though, where they overlap. I think I will try sealing and trimming the edges next time. But there was a lot more stuff even with the folded edges.
Snuggle
Daily Kitten Parade
The morning trek to open the coops and water the birds – Ash almost always comes with me, but sometimes Dumplin joins the parade.
Hawks and Eagles
I’m not sure if it is because the winter has been particularly cold or the local lake is drained and the ecosystem is disrupted … but we’ve never had a problem with hawks and eagles until this year. For most of the year, the buzzards keep them away. But this month! We lost a duck to a hawk — I came around the corner and saw the thing eating a duck. A week or so later, two ducks were missing and big feathery spots were in the duck yard. We put a small radio tuned to a talk station out in the duck yard — which seems to have helped there, but we lost two chickens today. I think a rooster tried to rescue the hen and was taken out. So Anya spent the day making scarecrows for both the duck and chicken yard. I mounted old CDs around the fence.
Even more ice
