Schweet!

During our exploration of the woods behind our home, we've found about a dozen or so maple trees.  Even though none of them are sugar maples, Jordan thought that we should try to glean some sap from them anyway.  So we bought some new taps, cleaned out some old milk jugs & juice jars, jury-rigged some plastic tubing, and waited.  The weather has been fairly irregular, with warm days when the sap freely flowed to freezing stretches when it froze.  In the end, we gathered 15 gallons of sap, which is clear and looks very much like water (who knew?!?)

Yesterday we started boiling the sap down:

We kept adding to the pot every hour or so until late last night, and then we started up again around 8:00am this morning.  By 4:00pm, the liquid had boiled down quite a bit and was starting to turn a nice golden color:

At 8:30pm the sap had boiled down into a thick syrup.  It tastes amazing, and the color is dark - just the way I like it.

We're already planning for next year.  Jordan will clear away the pine trees surrounding the maples to allow for more warmth from the sun to enhance the sap flow.  We're also going to clear paths to the maple trees to make it easier to tote jugs back and forth.  Who knows, we may even freeze some snow so that we can make some candy while we're boiling the syrup.  It was a great learning experience for all of us.  We can't wait for next spring!

It's All About the "Do"

Thane has never been to the barber shop.  We usually wait until his hair is about 3 inches longer than it should be, and then Jordan buzzes it all off.  But since Jordan has been out of town for a couple of weeks, I finally put my foot down and we ran to the local barber.  It took a little convincing, but we are thrilled with the result.  It will be a fun surprise for Jordan when he returns tomorrow.

Happy Spring!