Very bad year for ticks so far. Time to release the dinosaurs.
The tipping point
2 pear trees (one heavily defended)
2 more red currents
2 plum trees
3 more apple “trees”
2 cherry trees
With everything we are putting in the ground this year, in 4 to 5 years, we should reach the point where our land produces much more than we know what to do with. This will coincide with being close to, if not entirely debt free. We might even have built a rental house by then too.
It’s impossible to know what things will look like exactly, but it’s easy to foresee there will be a tipping point where we finally reap the rewards of our hard work and investments.
30 Raspberry plants in the ground
More to come…
Down with the Sweetness
Processing the honey we harvested
Maple Syrup & Honey this year
Glorious Garlic Uncovered
Nothing sets the tone of the starting the season like something already green and already growing. Garlic is awesome for this.
600 bulbs, 4200 cloves
Learning the great art of building culverts
Mud season is making evident a whole lot of wet spots on the land, and the paths they drain through. This one path has been and issue for a while and now it’s all nice, flat & quaint 🙂
No sap production for weeks, getting the bucket ready for better weather ahead.
The porcupine started exploring new paths, probably prompted by the warmer few days we had when we did the first round of sugaring. 
Tough sugaring so far
Very tough sugaring so far, the weather isn’t cooperating. The conditions on the ground are horrible with ice and melting snow, you never know what will happen on the next step you take. Then you need to handle utensils in these conditions, next to a raging evaporator, glasses covered with steam, at night, by yourself. The potential is real for a freak accident that involves boiling, burning, impalement and maple syrup. We also had a wind storm which blew everything away but the cover on the evaporator thank god; a building around the evaporator will be very nice.
Some trees produce profusely
The sap wagon
Got stuck… had to shovel snow out from underneath the sap wagon
boiling away
Hello fogginess my old friend
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck
The reward: 1.5 gallons of unadulterated maple sweetness
The first collection
I got about 30 gallons of sap, handling  full time work and a homestead can be challenging, I finished at dusk. It is a great chore to end the day with, I just wish I could do things at a more leisurely pace.
Maple sugaring, season 2
We are ramping up again for our second season of Maple sugaring. With perfect weather ahead:
And based on a UVM study, I tend to prefer tapping early even with the chance of cold snaps as Winter & Spring figure out who the new boss is. Essentially from what I gather, you can’t tap too early but you can tap too late. I also really like the taste of early flow and the season is spread out in more manageable chunks of labor.
This sled is proving to be invaluable
The wife & kid are traveling but the neighbors are here to help
Cleaning the tanks and buckets takes a long while, it’s amazing we did it last year without a well for water.
It takes a lot of work to get everything ready, we will apply a lot of lessons learned last year. I uncovered the evaporator and didn’t even have to kick out a raccoon.
Traveling Wood
With decent snow, a new chainsaw, a large sled and the recently discovered “tire splitting” technique, we’ve been amassing a large quantity of wood.
Here’s what getting it home looks like, I’ve been working on 4 poplars which domino’d onto one another during the last surprise wind storm.
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The sled & ATV combo is also a great way to move children around.
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Kettle to the metal
We’ve been having static electricity problem in the house so we decided to take humidification seriously. Pots filled with water on the stove tend to be noisy so it was time to go legit with an actual kettle.
Friends gave us this great device
one vinegar bath later, it’s back in business.
We haven’t had static electricity issues since the kettle came online, unlike its modern counterparts, it will never break.
We upgraded our wood splitting setup with an old tire
