Making Maple Syrup

Whirlwind Weekend!

We have had so much fun this weekend!

It began on Friday with a trip to the Boston Science Museum with some wonderful friends! We saw the museum's new exhibit on frogs which was simply fascinating! I never knew there were so many differnt kinds! Here are some pictures from our day:

We arrived home around 5PM with just enough time to feed the animals and get to the New London County 4-H Public Speaking Competition. Nathalie had won in her category at the regional level earlier in the week and was now competing at the county level. It was a late evening and we finally got to bed around 10:30 PM! Samantha fell asleep about a half hour into the event.

Saturday morning we were up bright and early as we had invited two families from church for breakfast at our house. Both with the last name of SMITH and completely unrelated! We were serving up our own maple syrup, hickory syrup, sausage, bacon, and eggs! YUM! After we had our fill, we all trekked out to the woods where we showed them our animals and let the kids tap a maple tree. They pet the chickens and the goats and Sam showed everyone how we make our syrup. It was a wonderful time of food, fun and fellowship.

We then spent four hours cleaning our barn in preparation for kidding. We have three goats all due to kidd this week! The barn was a mess and we really scrubbed it down, even washing the windows and vacuuming the cobwebs! It was a lovely warm day and with so many hands, the work went quickly. The girls were rewarded with a trip to Meme's house! We again got home quite late, so we let everyone sleep in this morning!

And now we are supposed to get 14 inches of SNOW tonight!

We made SYRUP!!

We made SYRUP!!
Real, honest to goodness, SYRUP!!

After boiling down our 2 and 1/2 gallons of sap we got 1/2 cup of syrup! We would have had a little bit more, if I hadn't been so excited and poured some of it over my hand while I was trying to filter it. Hot syrup is like melted wax, folks. It burns and sticks to ya while it is burning!!

But, it tastes sooooo good! We had some drizzled over our vanilla ice cream as a treat. That was after we each had a spoonful straight from the jar, of course. We made sure to save some for Sam, Rachel and Samantha. I can't wait until next year when we tap more trees and can make even more of it!

Making syrup

This year we decided to foray into syrup making. Our taps were back ordered for weeks and we feared we were going to miss our opportunity. But they came a few days ago and the girls and Sam put out 4 taps with buckets. So far we have collected over 3 gallons of sap. The girls and I did the math and when we boil it down we will get about 1 cup of syrup. Enough for one plate of pancakes in this house.

We did a test run yesterday on top of the woodstove. Unfortunately our woodstove's top is not quite flat so the sap over cooked in some places. The girls did enjoy scraping the sweet syrup glue off the bottom of the pan though! Today Sam is going to try it over the gas grill outside as one of the books suggested.

We figure we'll iron out all the wrinkles now and next year we will be ready to go.