Maple Syrup Season 2017 begins!

Up here in the northwoods of Minnesota, maple syrup time has arrived!  Yesterday and today we tapped about 100 trees, and will probably tap another batch of trees tomorrow afternoon.   Making maple syrup is a big deal up here.   Many folks in the area boil up sap from their backyard trees, and everyone has their own ways of doing things.   For weeks before the sap runs, neighbors are talking about what to do different this year, how to improve the process, and arguing about the "best way" to do everything.   We have all spent time in the winter preparing sap bags and cleaning equipment and gathering canning jars.  Now the time is here..............
     Maple syrupping takes a physical toll on a person.   It's a lot of work!  Every year Harold and I say things like:  "We're getting too old for this."  Or "This will probably be the last year we do this".  Or "Boy, are we out of shape!"  But then, next year we forget about all this and do it again!  We know we are in for a couple of busy weeks of hauling sap, boiling sap, cutting wood, feeding the fire under the evaporator, filtering syrup, heating it, testing it, tasting it until we are sick of it, and finally bottling the finished product.   Folks visit each other and present a jar of this year's finished product, and everyone takes turns shaking the jar a couple of quick sideways shakes to see "if there are 3 bubbles in the syrup" - a good indication of a fine syrup made the right way and with the right thickness.   And of course we all have to taste each other's finished syrup and compare!
    Vermont has nothing on us up here in northern Minnesota!  We, too, can make a very tasty and fine maple syrup.   Making our own maple syrup means we can always have plenty to cook with and plenty for the year without spending an arm and a leg for it.   AND it comes right from our very own woods and we are proud that we made it ourselves!   Just buying a bottle of it at the store doesn't give you the same sense of satisfaction.   So, in spite of the work involved, here we go again!

We start by drilling a hole in a maple tree using a 13/64 drill bit.   Harold used to use a hand driller for this process, but a DeWalt drill is much easier for old folks like us!

The finished hole begins to ooze sap immediately.

A stainless steel tap is pounded into the drilled hole.

A sap bag is hung through the tap and a 3 inch hex head screw is driven into the tree just above the tap and bag to hold the bag in place securely through a grommet.

At this time of year, the path through the sugarbush is quite muddy and wet with puddles of water everywhere.   At least we aren't slogging through 2 feet of snow like we did about 7 or 8 years ago!

You can see 4 bags hung in this photo.   We tap trees on both sides of paths through our woods to make it easier to collect and easier to haul.

Our farm cats always tag along with us!  They think it's great fun to follow us in the woods and explore new areas - so many trees to climb!  So many logs to explore!  So many new scents to enjoy!  We had 10 of them follow us around this afternoon.

One of our tomcats, Smokey, watches Harold and inspects every newly tapped tree!  He has to know everything that goes on!

Here is one of the bags on a tree we tapped yesterday.   It already has about 2 gallons of sap collected in the bag.

We spent time this afternoon scrubbing out the bulk tank that we use to store the collected sap.   After cleaning the inside spotless, we tarped the tank to keep it clean.

We have a start on wood needed for the evaporator, but we will need a LOT more than this!   In between boiling sap, Harold will be cutting more wood and splitting it for the stove.

So this is what we need to do just to get started!  Tomorrow we will collect sap from the 100 bags, and on Monday we will get up early and boil sap all day long and feed the fire.   By evening, we should have "near syrup", which will be finished in the house to 218 degrees and filtered through a wool filter, and then allowed to sit overnight to settle out some more before canning it up the next day.    This process will be repeated over and over for probably the next couple weeks.    That is, IF it freezes at night and is above freezing during the day.    If the night time temperatures don't go to freezing, the sap will not run the next day, and we get a break from the process.   We collect sap until we either get tired of doing this, or until the trees bud out, whichever comes first!  (Usually we've had enough of this after about 10 days!)  We make anywhere from 10-20 finished gallons of syrup, and it takes about 40 gallons of sap (sometimes a lot more, varies from year to year) to make one gallon of finished syrup.

A Difference of 65 Years!

So today is my birthday and I turned 69!  Ah.......the "last year of my 60's".........next year I'll be really old.   ugh.   I spent part of the afternoon playing songs on my new organ in the living room.  Old pop tunes from the 40's, 50's, and 60's.   While going through some old photographs today I found one of me playing the piano when I was about 4 1/2 years old - about 65 years ago!  Even back then I was playing keyboards!  I remember that little toy piano well.   I played that thing almost into oblivion.   Today I am still playing a piano, as well as my accordion, the organ and the psaltery.  Music has always been a big part of my life, and I am so thankful that my parents paid for many years of music lessons for me.   I'm sure there were some times when it must have been a little tough to come up with money for those lessons at the Imperial Accordion Studio in South Bend Indiana back in the late 1950's.   I took lessons there until I was a sophomore in high school.   Then about 1963, the accordion became a very unpopular instrument in this country, so when my sister took organ lessons I tried to play that, too, more or less self-taught.  Playing the organ was so much more "cool", you know?  When I got to college I took a couple years of organ study and also later in life took some private organ lessons from a fellow at a church I belonged to in Rhode Island at that time.   Much later in years, I took a couple more years of organ study at Mankato State Univ.   Years of playing organ in churches sharpened my organ skills, as I was a church organist for almost 27 years. 
     I never put down the accordion, though, and continued to play at nursing homes, and for a while in a polka band as well as just for my own pleasure.   About 10 years ago I got a piano for free and started fooling around with that.  Although I'm no pro at the piano, for a self taught gal I don't do half bad and have learned 9 pieces of music by heart so I can play without music for at least a little while!
     A good friend bought me a psaltery back around 2000 and I took a couple lessons on that and then taught myself to play further.   A psaltery works on basically a keyboard principle but is played with a bow.  
     Today I play all 4 instruments from time to time at church for music specials, and also at nursing homes and community events.   I am so thankful that I kept up my music skills over the years!  Music brings me so much pleasure and is a good "de-stresser" in this crazy world we live in.  
     So, here I am at age 4 1/2 at my toy piano: 

And here I am 65 years later as an old woman of 69, still playing a keyboard instrument (my new Baldwin organ):

Happy birthday to me - and I hope that I'll be able to play music for many, many more years yet!

Improvements to the Dungeon - Talking Laundry

Like so many millions of other homemakers, my laundry "room" is in the unfinished basement.   When we built our house in 2005 we had lots of great ideas and plans, which included finishing the basement.   But over the years cancer, lack of finances and lack of energy (called old age) have taken their toll.   Making the laundry area look good was WAY down on the "home improvement priority list".   But recently we decided that something could be done to improve things, however small.
     First on the list I wanted a nice large table for folding laundry.  Then I wanted to incorporate a couple of antique washing day items we had.  Many years ago when Harold was an over the road truck driver, he went to a garage sale in Winnipeg Canada and saw an old clothes wringer, hand-crank style.   He thought it was interesting and bought it as a conversation piece with the idea he might be able to sell it as an antique someday.   Also, somewhere along the line, we inherited an old washboard.  We have no idea where or when we got it, but it, too, is an interesting conversation piece.  I thought these two items would be great to hang on a wall in my laundry area!
     First we had to finish the one wall in the area.   Since we both hate working with sheet rock, we decided that painted plywood would be just fine!  After a couple of evenings the wall was up and painted and I even put up a bit of wallpaper trim I got for free somewhere.   Meanwhile Harold built and painted a really nice, sturdy table for the laundry area - 4 ft x 5 ft.   Another reason for wanting a big table is that I have a laundry chute, which comes from upstairs down into the laundry area, and I needed a big place for the clothes to fall down on.   Also the large table will be great for a cutting table for my many sewing and craft projects!
     Here is a photo of the antique clothes wringer that Harold bought in Canada back in 1998 or so.

The front side of the Dowswell, Lees & Co wringer.  The writing on the front of the bottom board says:  "Wringers last longer and work better if clothes are evenly spread out and not bunched or twisted when passing through the rollers.   Always remove pressure from rollers by releasing top screws when not in use.   Keep bearings well lubricated.  Oil injures the rubbers."   I wonder how you can oil the bearings without getting oil on the rubber rollers?  Perhaps folks back then knew how!

Can you just imagine the work it took to hand crank and push and pull the clothes through the wringer?  Multiply that times the loads of wash and the number of household members, and you get an idea of just how busy Mother was!!

A close-up of the back of the clothes wringer.  A search on the internet showed this wringer to be about circa pre-1930 vintage and worth about $40 to $90

     Another item is the washboard.   I am not sure how old this item is, but with research on web sites my best guess is around 1940 or so.  During the WWII years, washboards were often made out of heavy duty glass so as to save metal for the war cause.

I have tried to find out what the 725 number means.  Numbers go up to 830 and the company went out of business in the early 1950's.   Cajun bands are about the only ones who use these old washboards now!

Here is the nice table Harold made for me:

And here is everything put together:

The laundry chute and my finished folding area.   The washing machine and dryer and tub is off to the right in this photo.   The laundry "room" is still a little rustic, but vastly improved!

Speaking of laundry stuff, I can remember helping my own mother put clothes through the wringer back in the late 50's.  I was just about 9 years old then.  When she would do a load of whites and the items went through the wringer, she would put them in "bluing" to whiten them.    If you can remember bluing, then you are as old as I am!  My Mom got a new washer and dryer sometime in the 1960's and gave up the old wringer washer, but it was fun for me as a kid helping her with the clothes back in those wringer days.   I also remember that boxes of laundry soap came with bath towels inside the box!  Boxes of Duz Detergent had nifty bath towels tucked inside.   I think every home had those towels, fairly thin flowered towels.  They weren't as thick and big as today's bath towels, but we thought they were something special!  I also enjoyed hanging clothes outside for my Mom.  I still love to hang clothes outside!   They come in so fresh smelling!  I am so glad I live in the country where the air is really fresh and breezy so that I can hang lines of laundry.  Perhaps few women do this today, but I still enjoy it.
      As for appliances, I am still using my old Maytag washer bought in 1983.  All those commercials about the "lonely Maytag repairman" are true!   I haven't had a thing go wrong with the washing machine since then.  We are also using a dryer that Harold had given to him 15 years ago, used, a Whirlpool.   I think those old American made appliances were pretty good back then.   Today's washing machines are something else, though, aren't they?   Huge, using a minimum of water and soap, and special kind of soap, and high efficiency (and very expensive, too!).   We sure have come a long way from using the old wringers and washboards, haven't we?

Strawberry Topping

This weekend I bought a whole box of strawberries.    My neighbor bought some from a special fruit truck and her husband also bought some.  She decided that 30 lbs of strawberries was too much for her, and so I bought a 10 lb box from her.   They were wonderful tasting, sweet and juicy!  I usually deal with California strawberries from the store, but these came from Florida, and I think they were better than any I've had in a long time!

Ten pounds of juicy red strawberries!

We ate some right away, and I have a couple pints left for eating later.  This afternoon I made a most wonderful Strawberry Topping for ice cream or waffles or pancakes.   It turned out great.   I made 4 jars of it, and had a little left over, so we had homemade waffles tonight for supper and used up the small amount that was left.

Yummy topping on the waffle!  (Please excuse the burned corner of one waffle!)

Tonight I am finishing up 9 jelly jars of preserves.  I like to make preserves rather than jam, as it is more fruity and can also be used as a topping if desired.   I can tell you that these jars of strawberry goodies are not going to last very long!  They are SO tasty!
Here is the recipe I used for the topping.  It is from a great book by Linda J Amendt called Blue Ribbon Preserves.   I have gotten so many great recipes from this book, and all of them that I have tried were perfect.   The preserves recipe is just from the current edition of the Ball Blue Book.
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STRAWBERRY TOPPING

5 cups of hulled and sliced fresh strawberries

1 1/2 c. sugar 

3/4 c. water 

2 T fresh lemon juice

few drops of red food coloring

Using a vegetable masher, gently crush 2 cups of the strawberries and set the remaining berries aside. 

     In a large saucepan, combine the sugar and water.   Over medium heat, stir and heat  until the sugar is completely dissolved.   Stir in the crushed strawberries.   Increase the heat to medium high and bring the mix to a boil.   Reduce heat and simmer the mix for 5 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent sticking.   Then stir in the remaining berries and the lemon juice.   Add a few drops of food coloring if you like a deeper color topping, but this is optional.  Simmer on high heat stirring constantly for 1 minute.   Remove from heat and ladle the berry topping into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch head space.   Put on lids and rings and process in a water bath for 10 minutes for half pints and 15 minutes for pints.  

Makes about 4 1/2 jelly jars of topping. 

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The Ball recipe for preserves makes 9 jelly jars of preserves with a little left over.  Preserves are also good as a coffee cake topping, over ice cream, or as a filling for jelly roll cake, and of course it is great over fresh biscuits or bread. 

If you get a chance to get access to a bunch of strawberries, I encourage you to try the topping recipe.   It is more like a sauce than jam, but so good!!
Edited to add a photo:   I couldn't resist taking a picture of the jars of strawberry topping on my pantry shelf - don't they look scrumptious?

Jars of strawberry topping waiting for a bowl of ice cream!