A Maple Syrup Extravaganza

I have always wanted to try making homemade maple syrup.  For years my dad has told us about how in his childhood he made maple syrup one year up at the cottage over an open fire.  To hear him talk about that homemade syrup you would think it was liquid gold.  He dreamily reminisces about the "smokey, ashy" flavour of the syrup that made it virtually incomparable to the store bought stuff.

The hilarious part was that I was asking my grandma about this on our last visit and she informed me that my dad left out the most important part of the story.  According to Grandma, Dad was very excited about making syrup at the beginning of the process and diligently tended the fire and watched the sap boil.  However, as the sap needed to boil longer and then longer still, he got progressively more and more bored.  Sadly (though also hilariously in hind sight), right at the end of the boiling process when the sap had almost become syrup, my dad got distracted by the arrival of the neighbour kids next door.  Allegedly he forgot about the sap completely and once he finally remembered to return to the fire, the syrup was burned to a crisp!  Smokey, ashy taste indeed!  Funny how in all the years of hearing about his syrup making past, this is the first time this alternate ending has come to light.

In my humble opinion there is nothing more delicious than sugar - except for honey and maple sugar.  Maple sugar even trumps honey in my books and that is saying something since I am willing to sustain multiple itchy, painful bee stings in order to get honey.  So, I was very excited when Ian proposed trying our hand at homemade maple syrup this year.  The idea originally came from Paul (one of Ian's Scout friends) and we quickly jumped on the maple syrupy bandwagon.

After some neighbourly reconnaissance (country folk can always be relied on to know who has got the best apples, herbs, flowers, turkeys, eggs, maple trees etc.), Ian discovered that our neighbour across the street and a few doors down has a bunch of mature maple trees on his back property.  This neighbour actually has a real sugar shack back there too and in his younger years was apparently pretty serious about the maple syrup harvest.  He is older now and does not have the energy to keep doing it but he was generous enough to let Ian harvest sap from his trees.

Ian and Paul began by identifying (what they thought) were sugar maple trees and hammering in some taps.  While it is a bit challenging to tell which trees are maple versus not when the trees have no leaves, Ian and I once did a winter nature walk in High Park when we lived in Toronto where they taught us to identify maple trees by looking for an opposite branch pattern.  Sugar maple branches shoot off opposite each other.  While this helped a bit, there was no way to tell sugar maple trees from other types of maple trees so Ian and Paul did their best.

The guys tapped 29 potential sugar maple trees and tied on plastic Booster Juice (ooh, how I love Mango Hurricane Booster Juice) buckets to catch the running sap.  It took several days after tapping for the sap to begin to run because we have had very unusual weather this spring and consequently a very short sap season.  Sap only runs when the weather is -5C at night and +5C during the day.  There was really only a week this year where Mother Nature obliged with the required temperatures.

Collecting the buckets of sap proved to be quite the workout.  As the weather began to warm up, the maple forest began to turn into a muddy lake (kind of like our back yard).  Collecting sap required Paul and Ian to trek through several inches of water when moving from tree to tree.  It resulted in very sweaty men (from carrying heavy buckets of sap) with cold, wet feet.  Not a pretty situation.

Once collected and transported back to the house, the sap needed to be boiled pretty much immediately (or else kept cold and who has a fridge big enough to do that?!) so that it does not ferment.  Ian boiled the sap in a huge bucket over a propane stove on our front walkway.  Once the sap got concentrated enough, he finished boiling it in the kitchen on our natural gas stove because he found that he could control the temperature better.  I had been told by numerous people never to boil sap inside because the evaporating sugar makes all the kitchen cupboards sticky but you have to choose your battles.  I suppose trading sticky cupboards for a maple syrup harvest and a continuing marriage is not such a bad deal.

We used coffee filters to remove
random crud from the sap.

After filtering the sap was crystal clear.

Homemade maple syrup.

Our final yield was about 9L of maple syrup.  My dad joked that we were not making any money on this venture saying our syrup likely costs $100 a gallon due to all the propane it took to boil down the sap.  His estimate is likely pretty close.  The ratio of sap:syrup is close to 40:1 so it was a lot of boiling.  Besides, we are getting used to our farm endeavours costing us more money than we make; I guess we will just have to add maple syrup to the list alongside eggs, honey and apples.  Thank goodness we are not in this to make a living - just some delicious pancakes!

Hive Relocation Initiative

When we first started bee keeping we positioned our single hive off to the side of our backyard where the best tree cover was available as a wind barrier.  This worked well to the keep the hive protected from the elements and it was a helpful bonus that the hive was not too far from the house for regular hive maintenance.
  

This all changed; however, when we upgraded from one hive to four.  Our four fold increase in hives also equated to a four fold increase in bees.  Or, to think of it another way, from between 60,000 to 80,000 bees during the summer months to between 240,000 to 320,000 bees.  That is a lot of bees to have flying around our backyard.  Last summer, I swear trying to hang Liam's diapers on the line became an extreme sport.  Both Ian and I sustained numerous bee inflicted injuries.

It is a bit ridiculous to have to wear a bee suit in order to hang clothes on the line so this summer, the bees are being re-homed to another part of the backyard that is much further from the house.  Speaking of extreme sports, try moving bee hives full of angry bees.  Ugh.

We wanted to move the hives as early in the spring as possible to cause the least confusion to the bees but we had to wait until enough snow had melted to allow us to set up the new hive platforms.  We also figured the hives would be at their lightest with the fewest bees and least honey stores in the early spring.  

The morning before the big move, we placed towers of different colours of Liam's dupplo blocks beside the entrances of each hive to give the bees a visual locator for their hive.  We read that bees sometimes have trouble finding their hive again after a move and that a bright visual cue can be used to help them adjust to a hive relocation.

We waited until night time when all the bees were at home before beginning the move.  First we very stealthily taped up the entrances to the hives and covered each hive with a sheet to catch any rogue bee escapees.  We then used the wheel barrow to transport each hive very, very carefully to the fenced off area at the back of the yard behind the chicken run.

After removing the tape from the entrances we placed some hay in front of the main door of each hive.  This is supposed to disorient the bees a bit when they exit the hive causing them to look back at the hive and make a conscious note of their new location.  Hopefully they look back and see their coloured blocks so they can easily find their way back to their new home.

It is now about a week later and the bee relocation initiative seems to have been a success.  There are still bees in all of the hives at the new location and there are no mountains of lost, dead bees at the old hive location - so I think we are in the clear.

Here's to a buzzy new home far away from the clothes line!

Flash Freeze

On Monday afternoon it was 25C (77F).  Today it is -9C (16F).  This is no joke.  Following the unexpected blizzard yesterday afternoon, temperatures dropped rapidly resulting in a flash freeze.

The rain water in my wheel barrow is frozen.

The "lakes" in our back yard have turned into ice rinks.

Our pond re-froze.

The clothes on our line were wet from the rain storm and are now frozen solid.

There are icicles on Liam's sweat pants.

My shirt is as stiff as a member of Abnegation. haha.

The water line out to the chicken coop froze.  For the first time this
winter I had to lug water from the mudroom out in a bucket.  Ugh.

Even baby Liam's cheeks were frosty after our walk.
Luckily he looks super cute with rosy red cheeks.

 What a frosty day.  I hope the warm weather comes back, otherwise that was a VERY short spring.

Outside...right now

Can you believe what I am seeing outside my window right now?  I am shocked and dismayed.

 I guess Mother Nature had a change of heart.  Not impressed.

Property for Sale: New Neighbours?

Our farm is bordered on one side by an equestrian park and on the other by nine acres of vacant farm land.  While we love our front neighbours, we also love not having any next door side neighbours.  There is something to be said for being able to prance around your backyard in your underpants and not have anyone see you (and think you're really weird).

So, we were surprised (and concerned) to see a For Sale sign on the vacant land beside our house this past winter.  Since we've lived here, this land has been owned by our diagonal neighbours who purchased it eight years ago to prevent anyone from building a house across from theirs.  They like their front yard privacy.  However, they are now looking to retire and are selling the land to supplement their retirement income.

It was my dream when buying Gael Glen Farm that we would eventually purchase the property next door to expand our farm from two acres to ten.  However, the increase in value of this particular piece of property over the last decade has been quite significant - from $90K in 2005 to an asking price of $249K now.  Holy cow!

From what we have heard the land has now sold to a young family with two children a bit older than Liam.  Word on the (country) street is that the buyer is a child of the cattle farmer that lives across the street and two doors down  from our diagonal neighbour selling the property (the other way down the street from our maple tree neighbours).  The new family will be moving from their current suburban home and is planning to build a single family home on the property in the near (though not immediate) future.

Given that there is no way we could afford to buy the property given the price (trust me, we thought very, very hard about it), having a young family move next door is really the next best thing.  Hopefully we all become friends and their children will become playmates for ours.

Liam and the neighbour kid?  Hopefully...

Springtime Snapshots

It's been a long, hard winter but Mother Nature has finally decided to allow spring to make an appearance.

Below are eight ways we know the big thaw is finally here at Gael Glen Farm.

#1 Our backyard has turned into a muddy lake.

Lake

Bigger lake

Biggest lake

Mud

#2 We can dry Liam's diapers on the clothes line.

#3 Everything is crooked.  For example, none of our gate latches line up...at all.  Bungie cords to the rescue!

#4 Our tulips and daffodils have sprouted.

#5 We can see our box gardens again.  They are no longer completely covered with snow.

#6 Our hens and ducks can play outside (in the mud, of course).

#7 Ian is putting the summer tires on the car.

#8 We are making maple syrup.  We would like to extend a big "Thank You" to our neighbours across the street and a few doors down for letting us tap their maple trees.  More details on this sweet endeavour in a future post.

Ian boiling sap

Our first batch of syrup

Someone is very excited about maple syrup even though he has never tried it

 Welcome spring!  Come on in!

Bee Success!

We went into the hives today to check and see how our honey bees are doing given the immensely long winter and (what feels to us to be a) very delayed spring. We have excellent news to report - three of our four hives survived the winter!

We cleaned out the dead bees from the bottom boards, removed any moldy frames or leftover bee candy and added pails of freshly prepared sugar syrup.  Things are looking great.  Hopefully this bodes well for an excellent honey harvest this year.  At least we're starting off on the right track.  Happy bees make happy bee keepers.