Portage River Farm

Conditions must have been perfect on Thursday. When I went out into the woods on Friday morning the sap sacs were bulging heavily on the trees. The task of emptying and hauling the sap back to the house became quite a chore. Equally problematic was finding enough containers to hold it all after it had been briefly boiled to stabilize it.

The take for that single day was 9.75 gallons. That's more than 1 1/2 gallons per tree! That one-day flow beats the previous best day by a mile and represents roughly one-third of our total sap collection for the season thus far.

I now have every large pot and container in the house full of frozen sap and Janet is just about fed up with not being able to use any of her cooking pots. Saturday morning we are going to fire up the woodstove evaporator and start boiling down the accumulated 21 gallons. If all goes well we should end up with three times the syrup that our last run yielded.

Noise

I am a night owl and don't require as much sleep as the rest of the family. Most nights will find me knocking around the house until 2 or 3am. At a little after midnight a few weeks ago I walked out into the dark to retrieve something from my car. As I approached the vehicle a sudden explosion of unfamiliar noise stopped me in my tracks.

Hopefully if you click on the link above you can hear what I did. It is a crazy collection of high-pitched wailing, wavering howls and barks. It sounded as if somebody was torturing a large number of puppies nearby. It was very loud and seemed to be coming from the wooded area across the road to the west of our farm. It sounded as if it would have taken at least ten individual animals to make that much racket.

Since that night I have figured out that the noise comes from our apparently sizable population of coyotes. Most evenings, I can walk out on the deck and listen to them howling back and forth. On the occasions when they gather together for a group howl, as I had heard that first evening, it can be amazingly loud. Now that I know what to listen for, I can hear them in our closed up house, even over the furnace and whatever other noises are around me.

I imagine that we are destined for a rocky relationship in the future as we fill our farm with tasty treats such as chickens, ducks, turkeys, calves and goat kids. It has me thinking about strong fences and even worrying about our dogs a little. I would think they would avoid a scrap with Finn, our 90lb yellow lab. Sirona, on the other hand, is a frail and elderly 40 lbs that would probably be much more tempting.

Since it took a while to gather enough to justify boiling it down, I have been briefly boiling and then freezing the sap until I had a little over nine gallons. Then I fired up the woodstove evaporator in the back yard and tended it late into the night (click on the video). Last night I finally finished the syrup by boiling it on the kitchen stove until it reached the correct specific gravity which I measured with a hydrometer.

Once it was officially syrup, I filtered it for bottling by pouring it through a special wool syrup filter. This proved to be the least fun step of the entire process. Because I had so little syrup, it was difficult to keep it hot enough for it to easily flow through the cloth. By 2am I finally managed to get the result bottled as you can see in the photo.

In the end, I only got 16 oz. of syrup from the original 9.1 gallons of sap. By my calculation that means the sugar content of the sap was originally 1.07%. That is unfortunately about half that of a typical sugarbush of proper sugar maples. At that rate, I will need to boil down 73 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup. I assume that means that my planned tree identification exercise next summer will reveal that we have Red and Silver maples.

Nonetheless, the resulting syrup is light amber and very tasty. I passed out samples this morning and everyone was surprised that the taste was a more creamy vanilla-caramel than the expected standard maple flavor. Aidan was ready to haul out the griddle and fire up the stove for a pancake breakfast. I told him that we may wait a while before cracking that bottle open. It took too much work to make it and I just wanted to put it somewhere prominent and occasionally hold it up to the light to admire the maple magic.

Aidan, Sean and I headed out this morning into a dripping world. The warm air was making quick work of melting away the snow accumulation of the past weeks.

We hauled our maple tapping gear out into the woods and got right to it. We drilled each tree, tapped the spouts in place and hung the blue plastic "Sap Sacs" in place. We were a little late in the morning and the temperature was already 43 degrees when we started. It seems that we missed most of the day's flow.

The third tree that we tapped rewarded our efforts with a steady drip of faintly sweet crystal clear sap out of each spile. The boys took turns catching the drips in their mouths before we set the bags in place. You can see from the picture that Aidan would happily have stayed there acting as a human sap sac.

All of the trees stopped dripping shortly after they were tapped, most likely due to the crazily warm weather. We probably collected a few cups before it stopped. Now we'll have to sit back and see what the weather will bring us.

After searching the internet for a while, I came up with this picture. (If you click on the image, I believe it will give you a larger view.) It is an 18th century horse-drawn snowplow reconstruction that was built in Germany. I don't imagine this is anything like the one her father used.

Call me crazy, but that looks as if it would be really simple to build. It is basically a box with a wedge shape attached to the front of it to push the snow to the sides of the road. I have lumber that I could use sitting around and could make a scaled down version. What I don't have is a horse. This is where the crazy part comes in...I started wondering why I couldn't pull it down the driveway with our van!

I don't know if I'll actually try it but I think it's a cool idea and would probably work. The only problem that I have read related by old-timers who remember seeing them used was that they tended to wander back and forth behind the team as the snow drifts on each side pushed it sideways.

It would be fun to try it but I suppose it would let the neighbors know what kind of a nut moved into the neighborhood before I've had a chance to introduce myself!

This morning's 7 degree temperature did little to dampen my rising anticipation of spring. If you have a look at my Sugarbush page on the website (under "Tour the Farm"), you will see that I have been carefully tracking the daily highs and lows.

Since mid-January, we have been seeing an upward warming trend. It is true that there have been a few dips back into bitterly cold territory, but the trend is there just the same. We have had two days above freezing and are looking to have a third this coming weekend.

I am watching the charts for the best time to tap the maple trees. The best condition for sap flow is daily highs at least in the upper 30's and nights in the 20's. Part of the risk of tapping too early is that a return to colder weather will stop the sap flow and the cells in the tapped holes will begin the process of sealing up before the season is through. The risk of starting too late is that warmer temperatures of March and early April will cause the sap to get "buddy" and unusable as the composition changes to stimulate the opening of leaf buds.

If nothing else, the rush is really just my excitement to get out of the confines of the house and start doing something on the farm!

Two nights ago, I attended a meeting of the Huron River Watershed Council. They were holding a special meeting to kick off an effort to educate and mobilize individuals in our area to work at a grass-roots level to improve and protect the health of Portage Creek.

The waterway that flows through our valley is called "Portage Creek" for much of its length. The lower portion of the creek flows through the nearby town of Hell, Michigan, where it picks up the name "Hell Creek". The very lowest portion of the waterway, nearest to us, has also been called "Portage River". It empties into Portage Lake a few miles further downstream and then into the Huron River. From there it flows into Lake Erie, over Niagara Falls and ultimately through the St. Lawrence Seaway, past Montreal and Quebec, into the North Atlantic near Newfoundland.

The Huron Watershed Council is a non-profit organization that has been instrumental in promoting environmental awareness and local action to protect the health of the river. They have been working in each of the tributary watersheds and are now working on the last, that of Portage Creek. They have been collecting data on insect species, water conductivity, seasonal water levels and bottom silt sampling at two points in the creek for the past decade.

The Portage Creek watershed is very healthy for a number of reasons. It is very rural and a fair percentage of the land is state-owned nature preserve and recreational area. There are some problems in the upper reaches of the watershed from more intensive agriculture and there is one lake in the system that has a mercury problem that is slated for cleanup.

Our farm is at the extreme lower end of the watershed. Although the river passes only 200 yards to the south of us, our land actually drains through a large wetland that starts in our backyard, flows parallel to the river for more than a mile and empties directly into Portage Lake.

The meeting was well attended and informative. I met lots of nice people from the area and we discussed measures that we hope to take to make sure that the present health of our creek is preserved and improved. We plan to look into the master development plans of our local communities, work to educate landowners on the importance of maintaining buffer strips of vegetation to filter out sediment and approach the county road commission with concerns about siltation from erosion where our dirt roads cross the creek. I look forward to working with this group in the future and getting my kids involved as well.

(The photo is a bend in the mostly snow and ice-covered creek about 1/4 mile upstream of our farm.)

Be sure to take a peek at the new "Wildlife" page that I created this evening. You can reach it from the home page by clicking on the "Tour the Farm" link.

Yesterday morning, the boys and I got up early and drove to Battle Creek to attend the Michigan Family Farms Conference. It was hosted by an organization called Michigan Food & Farm Systems. It was pretty well attended despite the cold and snow.

I attended three classes. The first was on effective selling at Farmer's Markets. The second was all about the Organic Certification program of the USDA. The last was all about soil science and the use of cover crops to improve soil and reduce weeds, pests and plant diseases. I absorbed as much as I could and feel it was definitely worth the trip and the cost. It helped me to figure out a few first steps that I need to take.

More than anything, it made me aware of just how little I know about all of this. I learned that organic farming isn't really about finding clever ways to do without certain pesticides. It's about an entire system of stewardship and improvement of the health of the soil and the overall farm. It seems to me that it is probably a method of farming that would be more familiar to old-time farmers who really knew all of the tricks to boosting their yields long before we had the convenience of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.

I learned that there is a great deal to understanding how to assess the health of the soil and figuring out a plan of action to build it back up. My sister (who has had a long successful career in agricultural education in Florida) had mentioned crop rotation and the use of cover crops. It just went over my head. Now I'm starting to understand a little.

The main hallway was lined with booths from organizations and agencies that were all basically there to help. They have all sorts of programs and were all talking excitedly about the 2008 farm bill. I mostly was trying to understand what they do. I had an especially nice talk with a professor from Michigan State University who had tons of resources to offer from within the University. I picked up a whole bag of literature to puzzle my way through.

It was a little like having a whole bunch of people lined up saying "we're here to help, you just have to ask". To which I would have to say, "I have no idea what I'm doing! I don't know where to begin! I'm not sure what I need or how I'll ever get to the point of comprehending all of the programs and certifications available."

I did make one connection with a really nice guy who has a farm near us. About ten years ago he quit his job as a machinist (that makes three ex-machinists that I have met in the past week!) and started farming on their 30-something acre property. They now have a successful business raising cattle, sheep and selling hay. Probably the largest part of their income is from their 400 beehives. That's some serious beekeeping! I can't imagine how much time it takes to keep up with that many. They have a really nice line of honey products and sell beekeeping supplies as well.

Now that I'm back home and a teeny bit wiser, I plan to continue my work on the market survey of area farms. I also want to put more information on the website on the property and my fledgling plans for it. Stay tuned and feel free to offer advice. Just don't be surprised if I don't understand what you are talking about!

In the past week I have begun gathering information on what other farming families in this region are doing. There are probably better resources for this, but I have been using the web. I got a listing of all of the farms, orchards and farm markets in the lower peninsula and have been browsing their sites one by one.

I have to say that I have really enjoyed this exercise and have learned quite a bit. The websites range from very professional business sites that are little more than sales brochures to quirky, chaotic and personal glimpses into the lives and philosophies of the families. The best sites have left me charmed, feeling that I actually had a brief visit, kicked the tractor tires, patted the horses and peered behind the barn. There are a couple of families that I am going to have to find an excuse to meet and at least one that I plan to approach to discuss a potential business arrangement.

True to my own tendencies, I have created a number of files for compiling the information that I ran across on these sites. I have recorded all of the particular varieties of each vegetable and fruit that they mention growing. I also have been adding lots of items to my listing of potential products that I could produce and have noted all of the prices that I saw advertised for them.

It will take me a while longer to get through this task and even longer to actually turn the effort into some useful decisions on which of the thousand directions that I would like to go are wise choices.

Snow is getting to be a tired topic. If fact, I'm ready for spring to start right now....please! This one last note about the snow and then I'll send this blog off in some other direction.

The snowstorm came through today and dumped an additional foot of the cursed stuff on us. I was nearly reduced to tears of frustration to see the impassible wreck it made of the driveway. Freya and I started shoveling at the road in the hopes of at least making room enough for Janet to pull off of the county road when she came home.

I was grumbling to myself in the dark and attempting to find my shoveling rhythm while my every muscle and joint screamed in protest. I noted with no small measure of envy that my neighbor across the road was out clearing his drive with a powerful snow blower. As I stood there, Freya grabbed the shovel and was making an impressive amount of headway.

Next thing I knew I was looking into the headlights of a pickup that had pulled up in the road at the end of the drive. Out jumped a very friendly gentleman who proved to be the neighbor across the road from us. He had seen us at the end of the drive and came over to introduce himself and to marvel at our attempt to clear such a long and deeply buried driveway by hand. After our brief and friendly conversation he headed back to his house.

Freya and I had been arguing over our one shovel and she was doing her best to persuade me to go into the house and let her shovel for a while. Seeing that a second shovel would be a good idea, I trudged my way to my van with the intention of heading into town to the hardware store.

Looking back, I suddenly realized that Freya had company at the end of the drive. Jim, the neighbor, had returned with his snow blower and was busy sending a geyser of white arcing to the side of the road. He ended up lending it to me for the evening and in no time I was making a victory lap and heading across the road to return the blower and express my heartfelt gratitude.