Happy Leap Day

There's something special about a date that only happens once every 4 years. Any leap year babies out there? I wonder how I would feel if my birthday only happened twice a decade, give or take.
My aunt Pam's baby is due soon, I'm going to have a new little cousin. A girl to shower with all kinds of nice, girly, homemade things. Though she's not due until the 8th of march, part of me couldn't help but wonder if perhaps I'd have a leap day cousin.
Scouring my collection of patterns for a quick and easy baby present, since I've put it off way too long.... any ideas?

Keep a Weather Eye

Part of the reason I want to become a homesteader/farmer is a desire to get back in touch with the world around me. The real world, the world that matters. Like the moon phases, the seasons, weather patterns. What different animals do at different times of the year. And what it all means to a person who doesn't just live on this planet, but with it. I wanna know more about the food in my body, the clothes in my back and the roof over my head, I don't just want to pay for them.
I like that through the humble beginnings of syrup making I now check the forecast every day, and have some inkling of what that means for the food being produced for my belly. It's a start.
I want to continue this awareness throughout the growing season this year, not just dump veggie seeds in the garden and weed and water sporadically. I want to give my garden it's best shot at higher yields.

Liquid Gold

I can't get over how dark and how sweet it is, straight out of the tree!

Fat Tuesday

Happy Mardi Gras folks!
I was fixin to make up a fantastic jambalaya over here, and get some real cajun smells and tastes going in the house. My family however has a much less adventurous palate. Instead it will become a pancake tuesday, with fluffy pancakes (and because having both pancakes and king cake seems gastronomically redundant, I'll be hiding a bean in one of the pancakes... hehe!!) . A shame it's not a few weeks later, we could have had homemade maple syrup on them! For tonight, Aunt Jemima will have to do, but I'll also bring out toppings like butter, jam and apple sauce. I'm gonna try to sell them on pancakes made from scratch. It's all about reintroducing the folks to real flavours, and leaning away from preservatives.

First Sap

Only about a tablespoon in each bucket, but it's running!

Carding and Spinning

Today I finally started carding and spinning my wool, using the spindle that I picked up from my sweetheart yesterday.

To card the wool, I'm using slicker style dog brushes. They use the same type and shape of pins that hand carders have, though I find the bristles softer than hand carders I've seen at pioneer villages in the past. It just means that I have to use a couple more strokes to card the wool.
I found these brushes at the dollar store, and I think they cost 1.50$ each. While they are smaller than the paddles on traditional carders, and I can't card as much wool at a time, I couldn't argue with the price. I priced new hand carders in my area and found them around the 40-70$ range. I'll stick with dog brushes, thanks.




          

Then, I load up one brush with 3-5 locks of wool, cut ends towards the handle. I then brush from the cut ends to the tips until the wool is pretty uniformly fluffy, and evenly distributed between the two brushes.

Next use a scooping motion with the top brush to scoop up all the wool from the other. Now all the wool is on one brush.  I roll the wool off the pins (towards the handle), to make a thick cigar type shape. Now this roll of wool, called a rolag, is ready to be spun. I'll do my best to explain that process in the upcoming posts, but it's tricky to both spin (which takes two hands) and take pictures. I found a great set of instructions here. That might be your best bet for learning to hand spin. I'm new at this myself!

Tada!! Suddenly the fleece is yarn! Thanks for the spindle honey!

On Tap

That's right, I've now got sap on tap. Or rather, on 4 taps.

I went over to my friend's house today, it's past time to be tapping the trees in this weird season, and we decided that today's the day. Of course, today's about the only cold day we've had all month, but at least the spiles are in place now.


Dar met me in the garage and explained the process to me.
First we'd be drilling holes at an upwards angle, about 1.5 inches or so into the tree with a 5/8 drill bit. Then we use a special, high tech tool (a twig pulled off the nearby brush) to clear the wood shavings and check the depth of the hole. Then we push the narrow end of the spile into the hole and gently tap it into place with a mallet until it's firmly seated. The hook that hangs off the spile has to support the sap bucket. If you can wiggle the spile with your fingers, it's likely going to fall out of the tree and spill your precious sap all over the ground.



When we get to the tree the next obvious question is where to put the holes. As far as height goes, it needs to be high enough to suspend the bucket below it, and low enough that it will be easy to lift down the buckets, even when they're heavy with sap. Pictured at the right is a plugged hole from last season. Dar fills her holes in with pieces of wine corks to help the tree heal quickly. Any holes recent enough to be visible like that should be avoided by at least 5 inches.



This is the first spile! Right now it's only finger snug, it still needs to be tapped into place. I took pictures once the bucket was hanging, but it was so bright out I couldn't tell the picture was blurry on my camera screen. Use your imagination.

Dar doesn't use lids on her buckets and I decided not to either. Lids help to keep debris and rain water out of the sap. Rainwater just dilutes the sap which means you need to cook it down further, and bugs and bark are easy to strain out with coffee filters before you start to boil the sap.
It takes a little extra effort, but apparently is not as cumbersome as trying to work around a lid. I'll go with the voice of experience on this one.

In the first picture you can see the three buckets on the front side of the tree, and there is a fourth around the back side. Having the spiles all in one tree will make it easier for me as a beginner, because the sap should all be of a similar consistency on any given day. Different trees have different sap characteristics, and then I'd have to decide whether to separate them and make two separate batches or blend them all together.
On a warmer day the sap would start pouring down the spile almost immediately, but today it was too cold, so you'll have to wait for shots of sap in the pail.
Eagerly waiting for the mercury to climb.