Hurricane Farm

Update on the sap flow here in Scotland, CT.  (How come they did away with the old Conn. abbreviation, by the way?  I was always partial to that.)

We added 10 more taps in our new sugarbush up the road and collected the sap that ran over the past 24 hours...100 gallons came in from the new taps.  This is prime time for maple sugarin'!  At this rate, we will have to be gathering in the morning and the afternoon.  The trees here in our woods have also picked up and we gathered another 30 or so gallons.  Since we're in a valley, our temperatures are always about 10 degrees below the rest of the area.  Not so good for the early sap run, but great for extending the sugarin' season!

Did I mention how useful these things are?

We'll be sugaring in earnest now for the next several weeks it looks like.  If you are in the area, give a call and stop on by to taste some warm maple syrup.  It looks like some snow for the next few days, so we can serve it up "sugar on snow," the good old fashioned way!

It seems like our farm grows a bit more by the day.  Last week, we had a conversation about sugaring with some folks who have 100 acres on the opposite side of town.  Yesterday afternoon found us setting 50 taps in their pristine sugar bush.  We are now up to about 150 taps and the sap is flowing.  The new evaporator resulted in the best and clearest batch of syrup that we've ever made!  We bottled on Monday and we're set to start boiling again this weekend.

We've completely sold out of full CSA shares and have a waiting list for next year, so it seems.  We may have a couple of half shares left, but the response to this endeavor has been stunning.

Orders for chicken coops for Spring delivery are rolling in and we are thinking of taking in more hogs as demand for our pork keeps coming in.

Speaking of expansion...We've been eyeing several fields at the end of our road as well as across the ajoining road.  We are hoping to be able to come to some arrangement to perhaps lease the land, rent the land, or put in an offer to buy some of it outright to expand the farm.  Of course, the sort of capital needed to buy a field is not easy to come by, but there are at least opportunities for our farm to grow right here in the local area.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=65+kasacek+road+scotland,+ct&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=19.588751,36.5625&ie=UTF8&ll=41.719984,-72.09044&spn=0.008969,0.017853&t=h&z=15

Here is a link to the Google Maps Satellite image of our place.  Our place is marked with the bubble "A."  The fields in question are an inch or so to the North and East.  Much of these are for sale. 

As it is coming upon March here in New England, we find ourselves looking towards the reserve piles of split firewood that we stacked off to the side so neatly way back in the summer.  With little time to keep up with daily splitting during the sugaring season, these stacks of reserve wood come in handy.  They are nicely stacked--neatly, and in tight rows--as these piles represent the first wood nestled away for the cold season that seemed so far away back in August.  The wood in nicely seasoned and sets ablaze with the mere suggestion of a match.

But, there is something not quite right with this wood.  In fact, it is short.  Very short.  Split too small, and short.  Hmm.  What was I thinking back on those humid summer nights while cutting and splitting this wood? 

Was I so excited to be splitting wood and dreaming of a crackling fire in the wood stove?  Was the sweat that was stinging my eyes allowing the saw to cheat a little?  Did I forget how the larger pieces burn better, longer, and in the end, make for less work?

Whatever the case, I have been thinking deeply on these "Summer pieces" as I haul them in from the stacks each late Winter night.

While sugaring yesterday we heard something moving around in the woods.  And there is a lot of noise at any given time here at the farm.  It must have been huge! 

Luckily, Erica had our new camera and was able to capture what might soon become a world-famous photo.  When I was in 5th and 6th grade, I used to love reading about UFO's, the Loch Ness Monster, and other oddities.  This photo makes me think that we have our own mysterious beast lurking out there in the woods...

What WAS that lurching about in the woods?

We decided to investigate!  We did not find any tracks as the snow had mostly disappeared and the muddy ground was still somewhat frozen.  But, we did find some leavings...

Was that the remainder of this mysterious monster's lunch?  Maybe that is why this farm was deserted when we moved in...

Here Violet picks it up for closer inspection.  Looks like a deer bone.  So we know that this creature is an omnivore.  Interesting...

What have we here?  Further evidence of SOMETHING in the woods...

It's great having kids and exploring the woods.  You never know what stories will be pieced together.

We fired up our new evaporator and worked on our first batch of maple syrup yesterday.  We'll be finishing off a little over a gallon of syrup this morning!

We were warned by several people--both in books and in person--to NEVER let the level of the sap get too low.  Otherwise, we might scorth the pan and ruin it!  (Psst...I actually did this to one of my little pans last year, don't tell anyone.)  So to avoid this devastating mistake, we designed a measuring tool.  Note its fine wood grain, robust coloring, and tightly hewn edges.  With a little practice, we were able to keep the sap level just above that bottom line.  This meant 2" of sap in the pan.  Perfect for evaporating.

Here is a picture of the steam rolling off the top of the pan.  It took some adjustments, but we eventually learned the correct amount of wood to put in and the frequency of feeding the fire.  It needs the hottest fire imaginable! 

Here you can really see the fire cranking.  We were planning to use some of last season's left over--and really dry--hardwood for sugaring.  That is what I used to do.  However, the folks at the maple sugar making store suggested that we use pine, as it burns hotter and quicker and is more desirable for use in one of these units.  We had about 1/2 cord of slabwood from the local lumber mill left over from our summer parties and we used most of that yesterday.  Erica called the mill and they delivered a little more than 3 cords of slabwood yesterday morning.  That should be enough to hold us for the sugaring season, but the mill has plenty more and is more than happy to deliver.  That's a relief as we were a bit concerned about our truck when they loaded that first bundle in back in the summer.  The truck was riding LOW...

Back to the issue of keeping the sap level constant.  When in full blaze, the evaporator is supposed to handle 8-10 gallons per hour.  We did a little measuring and timing and it seems that we were close to 10 at our peak yesterday.  Lots of improvement from my exploits in previous years.  Below is a my "S.D. 3000."  We like Wallace and Gromit here on the farm and tend to name our inventions the way they do.  (Anyone recall the B.V. 6000?)  I used--that's right!--a five gallon pail and added some plumbing.  It takes a little patience to get the valve dripping just right, but the old "Sap Dripper" is doing its job.  I might switch over to a ball valve as they seem to be easier to adjust than the gate valve that I am currently using.

The "S.D. 3000" attaches to the evaporator via a hose and is able to supply fresh sap on demand.  Once I move the evaporator into the sugarhouse, I will be making the "S.D. 4000" which will not only drip sap into the pan but will preheat the sap.  I will be running some coils of copper tubing around the lower portion of the chimney pipe where it exits the firebox...That should heat up the sap as it drips from the bucket and help speed up the evaporation rate even more.  Who knows, maybe I'll work on that sooner...

My Dad came down again this weekend to lend a hand.  This photo finds him skimming the top of the sap to remove some undesirable content (a little ash still gets in from time to time as we are still boiling out-of-doors). 

Of course, there is lots of waiting while sugaring, so we decided to work on some other farm tasks.  We have a batch of replacement laying hens--about 45 or so--that need leg bands so we can identify their age.  My Dad figured out the banding tool right away.  Glad I didn't try this by myself.  I probably would have ended up banding my thumb to my index finger!

And then, of course, there is the tasting of the syrup...

Both Violet and Dad agree...it's not done yet.  This was Violet's third or fourth tasting.  She was out there with her wooden spoon just about the time that I finally got the fire going!

We'll post some photos of the finishing and bottling process as it progresses.

Here is a photo that my Uncle sent me after I mentioned one of my Grandfather's paintings in a previous post.  I am not sure when he painted this one, but the one below of him actually painting is from 1963.  I imagine that Grandpa painted the snowy maple sugaring scene after a winter's drive to VT with my Grandma and Uncle.  They were always driving around to points North, South, and West.  They oftentimes would go points East, but that would require using their boat (which they had).

Below is a photo of Grandpa working on what I believe to be a painting of a wharf in Rockport, MA.

We owe quite a bit here at our farm to my Grandfather, I suspect.  He always bought me REAL tools for Christmas, even when I was 4 and 5!  He would take me down into his cellar workshop and let me pound nails into scrap wood with my hammer, or let me reorganize his nail-holding coffee cans.  I use the same system here in my workshop and our kids have hammers and enjoy pounding nails into scrap wood too...

For some reason, I used to always confuse the two terms "wood chuck" and "ground hog."  So now I've taken to calling them "Wood Hogs" or "Ground Chucks" just for the fun of it.  While clearing out some nasty prickly bushes and reclaiming several hundred square feet of land, we happened across a neighbor's dwelling.  I knew that he was around last summer, and many a time was that I saw him scamper off in that general direction, but now we know where he lives.  My Grandpa used to have a large ground hog hole just down the road from his house.  We used to take apple peels and other yummies to him when I would visit.  I think maybe my Grandpa had made a truce with the little critter as I don't recall ever hearing about his gardens being invaded.  Our little guy is welcome to stay--for now...We'll see if he develops a taste for our garden greens come summer time.

I wonder how he will feel about our new landscaping of his front lawn?  It seems that he is still sleeping away in there.  No tracks were to be seen around the hole...but we'll keep a close watch out for this "Ground Chuck."  Or was that "Wood Hog?"

It's back into the woods to start gathering sap.  It's been still pretty cold at night--it got down to 10 here last night--but the sun is doing its work during the day and there is sap to be gathered.  Here's Liev making his way across our smaller brook.

As I've mentioned before, we like to put people to work here at the farm.  We like them to feel like they are at home, and we all know that there is no sitting around while at home.  Here we have my Dad tapping a tree.  Watch out for that poison ivy, Dad!  Everyone helps out.  Liev is carrying the bag of spiles and Violet is supervising and explaining to my Dad how to use the brace.

A closer shot of my Dad hard at work.

In addition to using the new 5 gallon pails, we also put out our older style buckets on some of the smaller trees.  Even though they have to be emptied more often, I think that they have a warm old-fashioned feel to them.  My grandfather was a painter and he had a fondness for painting maple sugaring scenes.  There is one large painting at my Uncle's house that offers a glimpse of the sugaring process complete with oxen pulling out the sap from the woods!  This photo of our buckets reminds me of my Grandpa and that painting. 

Finally, here is our "Maple Syrup Quality Control Tester" hard at work.  Note that she does not feel it necessary to wait for the sap to be actually processed into syrup!  Her verdict:  yummy!

For the past two days we have been trekking back and forth from the woods, hauling in planks to get across small brooks, hauling in tapping supplies, and hauling back our two children when they are finally ready to go inside.

We have a series of photos to share from the past two days.  The photo spread will take you from the arrival of our new sugaring equipment through to the tapping of the trees.  We will be adding more as we fire up the new evaporator for the first time.  I made a pretty cool device that will allow us to continually add sap to the boiling pan and I will add a photo of that later on.  It seems that the camera is on strike from being dropped in the snow...

Here is the new gear arriving from New Hampshire.

And here we have it all unloaded out behind the barn.  We have used a combination of aluminum buckets and milk jugs in our previous experience making maple syrup, but with our new evaporator we will need LOTS more sap to keep up.  So, as you may recall from a prior post, we are resorting to one of the most useful farm implements all around:  the 5 gallon pail!  We'll be adding 50 more (for a total of about 100) taps this year.  Also, the buckets will be nice as we can empty them once every other day instead of the twice daily routine with our smaller pails and jugs.  It is pretty far out to the woods, afterall.

You can see that we have the evaporator just about assembled in this shot. 

The next step was tapping the trees.  We still have a bit of snow on the ground out in the woods, and there are also lots of hidden "water holes" beneath these patches of show.  Look out!  There goes a boot!

My son has taken to using the brace and bit.  If we're not watchin him, he'll have every tree in the area tapped.  I wonder how oak syrup would taste? 

Here is Erica carrying the tubing.  We're using short pieces of tubing to connect the spouts (technically called "spiles") to the buckets.  In the future, we might run tubes directly from the trees out of the woods to large gathering drums.  We would start tapping the trees higher up, about 6 feet, and then gravity would help move the sap out of the woods as we slope down to the drums.  We're not sure that we want tubing running all through the woods, though.  I guess we will decide on this once we've determined the relative fun-to-labor ratio of hauling this stuff out by hand this year.

Here is a close up of a tapped tree.  On a good tapping day, you should be able to see the sap start dripping out.  If you look closely, you can see it starting to run out of the hole. 

Here is shot of several trees tapped alongside of our stream.  This summer the stream swelled significantly during a series of storms.  It was well up beyond the buckets in the photo.

And here we are after working hard at enjoying a hobby.  My son snapped this one whilst the camera was still with us.

Part two to follow.  Stay tuned...

The new evaporator is here!  Erica went up to New Hampshire Friday evening--returning at midnight--to pick up the supplies. 

With the help of my father, who put in some solid work while keeping strong hold of his advisory role, we assembled the evaporator.  It is supposed to use 40 firebricks.  We managed to use 48 of them.  We got it all together, ready to try out, and.....The doors did not fit!  Someone at the old evaporator makin' factory drilled the holes in the front doors incorrectly.  The doors DO fit upside down and backwards...Hmm...too much Moosehead up there in the Canadian factory, perchance.

The good news is that Chris, one of the guys at The Maple Guys, where we bought the unit, is sending a new set of doors to us today.  We should be up and running tomorrow making our first batch. 

We'll be posting photos of the tapping of the trees later on today...

Whew...Glad that's over.

This weekend we had to take three hogs to the butcher.  What was supposed to be done between the butcher's preferred window of 9:00 and noon ended up encompassing two days, 12 hours of pig wrangling and rebuilding of chutes and ramps, and two seperate butchers.

Our good friend Jeff was kind enough to lend a helping hand and was even kinder to contain his laughter at our attempts as pig wrangling.

There he is assessing my ramp and chute. 

See, I built this chute about 75 feet long.  It was made of some plywood, two old doors, my saw table, some actual tables, and some wooden pallets.  The chute was supposed to funnel the hogs from their pen, through the barn, into my work area, and onto the waiting truck.  We even constructed a nice ramp for them.  The concept was that they would walk down the chute, eating along the way, and move quietly and serenely into the cage on the truck.

Learned pig fact 1:  they don't prefer ramps.

The ramp ended up being too steep and the hogs never once even attempted to get onto the pitched ramp.  Back to the pen.

Here Erica is trying her best to coax this one up the ramp. 

Learned pig fact 2:  It's hard to coax an unwilling pig.

So, we swapped trucks for one with a lower tailgate, and made a new, improved chute and ramp.  This time, the pigs would have to use a ramp that only suggested an upward pitch.  We also tightened up the final portion of the chute to keep them from spinning and darting and clogging up the works in general.

This pig on the move was shot by my daughter, Violet.  Pigs are slow, right?

Learned pig fact 3:  Pigs are not slow.

Here you can make out the old door and my saw table.  It is, of course, the New England way to make everything available at any given time serve multiple purposes.

We finally got one hog into the truck and to the butcher.  We were able to cut down on the chute time for the second pig and got her to the butcher the next morning.  But we found out that this would be the last delivery that they would take.  They were, for their part, very understanding that we were having a tough time getting the hogs into the truck.  I forsee a trailer in our future...

We luckily were able to take the third pig to another butcher who was more than happy to accomodate us.  I'm glad, too, as I did not want to have a pig chute in my work area all week.

Here is a final shot of one of the hogs successfully using the ramp!  I am so lucky to have such a patient wife...she made a nice little trail of various foods for each pig.

Final learned pig fact:  They can be quite picky when they want.

The first pig liked pasta.  The second preferred cheese.  The final pig went for pizza!  We have the makings of a modern-day nursery rhyme.

So, one of the first things we did when we moved into our new farm was change the sign on the truck.  In fact, I ordered the new town label as soon as we found out that the closing was going through. 

We love tooling around in our pickup truck.  This is actually our second one.  We had a 1985 F-150 for several years and must say that it was the perfect truck for us.  It was a "self-oiler" and the only maintainence that we performed for the four years we had it was adding new oil. 

Our new truck (1991 F-150) was a step up environmentally as well as in terms of its relative usefulness.  This "new" one has 4 wheel-drive.  Woo hoo!  I've never had to load up, find out I'm stuck, and then unload an entire truckload of wood since this fine acquisition!  They say that heating with wood warms you several times...the cutting, the splitting, the stacking, etc.  Well, with a 1985 2 wheel-drive truck, you get one or two extra heatings with all the pushing, pulling, digging, and reloading when you're stuck in the mud.

Now that we have two kids, though, we have a hard time fitting into the bench seat of the truck.  Luckily, my wife's friend just gave us a 2000 Ford Ranger.  That's the newest vehicle we have!  With the dump truck purchase impending and the new Ranger, it is time to start thinking about a new logo for the doors.  I hope that I can fine that same font.  I think it's quite fetching.

How can one not love such a face?  The newest hog trio has a new game:  destroy the feed sack.  See, here are the easy rules...

1.  Pretend to eat your feed.
2.  Quickly sneak out of the gate as your water is being changed.
3.  Seek out nearby sack (either feed or wood-shaving, it does not matter).
4.  Proceed to rip it to bits while running up and down the barn.
5.  Smile as in above photo.

I can't tell if the pig is gloating or apologizing.  Your thoughts?

These sheep are about to give birth to winter lambs any day now.  We are hoping that all four of our ewes are expecting.  We'll be cleaning out and setting up seperate stalls this weekend to house the moms and their newborns.  We'll post pictures as this progresses.

This last one is one of the cattle.  Perhaps Mr. Greenshoes.  I am not sure which one this is.  We have eclectic names for our livestock, it's true.  But that is some of the fun.  We have had many rabbits named after characters from the Simpsons.  We had one trio affectionately named Patty, Selma, and MacGuyver. 

It looks like it will be just about time to tap the maple trees here in Connecticut this weekend.  We are expecting highs in the 40's and lows in the 20's for a week or so.  This will be perfect to get the sap flowing in the trees.  As we mentioned before, we are making some new acquisitions here on the farm.  We've made some progress in the silo front, and Erica is going to check it out in person and get some photos next week.  We really can't install it until the ground softens up. 

Until then, though, our thoughts are on sugaring!  We have placed a deposit on a new evaporator.  It is a long way off from our homemade deal that we have used in the past years.  We actually started with a tiny pan on a mobile fire-pit, and then progressed to a series of woodstoves and cinderblock evaporators.  This year we will be moving up to a much more efficient system.  Not only will we cut down on our wood consumption, but we will also be able to cut down on all that sitting around and waiting that accompanied each of our older evaporators.  Not that sitting around and waiting isn't an integral part of sugarin'...but we have lots of new chores this year at the farm to fill any and all "free" time...

Here is what the new evaporator will look like.  Erica is going to try to pick it up this weekend, and with any luck we will be sugarin' in a few days.

The next shot is from our latest homemade setup.  We actually were pretty darn effecient for a homemade deal...we had a pre-warmer, two evaporator pans, and a raging fire...You can see that the sap is boiling away in the front pan.

Finally, here is a shot of a group of visitors learning about how to make maple syrup at our place last year.  Erica is always encouraging folks to come by and visit or tour the farm.  And I'm always looking to get some helpers in any and all farm tasks!  We use an old-fashioned brace to drill the trees.  That was a great Christmas gift that Erica was able to get for me at the livestock auction two years ago.  Sure beats the cordless drill and most assuredly beats using five extension cords (did it the first year!).  We have some "real" sap buckets, but never enough...so we supplement our sap collecting with 1 gallon jugs.  It seems that most large producers have been switching over to tubing, so there are lots of used buckets to be had.

We'll give an update once Erica returns from New Hampshire with the new equipment.  We've already decided on the location of the sugarhouse, for which I will "break ground" with an official ceremony of sorts as soon as the snow is gone this year.  I hope to start framing it up over the summer and maybe use it next year.  This year we will have to sugar outside again and cover the new gear with a tent to keep it dry and safe between sugaring sessions.