A Frabjous Day!

What a wonderful warm day we had today!  I was able to get into my high tunnel greenhouse and do some real work!  As I walked into it the first thing that came to my mind was the poem by Lewis  Carroll called the Jabberwocky, and the line: 
 

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" 

That's about how I felt today - glad that I could get out and enjoy my passion in life, gardening! It did indeed feel like a "frabjous day", a day for singing. 
There were off and on showers, but that didn't bother me inside the greenhouse.  That's the joy of having a high tunnel greenhouse - you can work in the garden even in the rain!  Harold helped me get the hay bales and most of the straw out of the aisles and the straw covering the garlic.  I left some straw in the walkways because the soil is still fairly wet in there, and I didn't need to be slopping around in mud.   I was delighted to discover that the garlic I planted last fall is up and growing nicely.  Since it was an extremely cold winter I had my doubts that the garlic would survive the cold.   But it did!   
     I spent an enjoyable day in the greenhouse which I affectionately call "Patty's Playhouse".   I need to get a sign made for the front that says this!

The first thing I needed to do was turn over the soil and pick out weeds that were already growing!   I also think I need a new thermometer because it was not 100 degrees in there!

The soil was tilled up and nicely raked smooth, ready for planting.

Gardening is indeed my therapy!  I bought this ceramic rock decoration at a friend's garage sale a couple years ago.

Getting ready to plant some buttercrunch lettuce.

By the end of the afternoon I had planted up three 26 foot rows of lettuce, spinach, and salad greens,  and a few rows of snow peas.

In a few days I will plant these seedlings of leeks after they get a chance to harden up a bit.

Two nice shoots of garlic coming up.   I planted the garlic last October before Halloween.  It needs to be planted in the fall, and grow in the spring and early summer.   I harvest the garlic shortly after the 4th of July.   Fresh garlic is wonderful for cooking summer veggies, and is a great seller at the market booth.

As you can see, we had considerable mouse damage to outdoor plants this winter.   The little rascals chewed up everything they could find under the deep snow.   My farm cats couldn't get to them in the 4 foot deep snow, but the mice were able to get around and chew everything.  They chewed up our Nanking cherries, chokecherries, roses, and gooseberries.   Fortunately they did not chew up the grapes.   Perhaps grape vines are not very tasty to them?   We learned a lesson that everything must have wire cages around the bottoms of fruit bushes and trees to deter the mice.

And so my busy outdoor season begins!  I just love growing things and being outdoors.   I can listen to the birds, the trumpeter swans, the woodpeckers, and later on, the loons as they fly from pond to pond.   There are lots of "sounds of nature" out there to listen to!  This is so relaxing and enjoyable!  Yes, indeed -

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Finally! Spring Has Come to Minnesota!

Everyone here is so excited!  Spring has finally sprung for us!  The snow is gone, and we are more than ready to get into outdoor work.   Today I canned up the last of the maple syrup that we made.  This weekend we will pull the taps and discard the bags, and I will boil and sanitize the stainless steel taps to put away for next year.   We ended up with a little over 4 and a half gallons of syrup, which is quite low for us, but with the deep snow and difficulty getting around in the sugarbush, we decided this was "enough".   There's always next year.
     The plants I started in the living room under grow lights are more than ready to be hardened off and set out next month.   This weekend I will clean up the greenhouse and set the plants out there to harden up for a couple weeks.   This always brings out the "green-ness" of the plants and makes them strong.   I will also be planting spinach and snow peas and salad greens in readiness for our first market day in June.
     Harold was busy getting the beehives ready for new bees.  Our bees did not make it through the long extremely cold winter.    This is not uncommon for us northern beekeepers.   We have new bees coming in early May, so Harold was cleaning up the hive frames, and scraping propolis and discarding dead bees.   We have the electric fence on right now, even though there are no bees yet, because the bears are out of hibernation and hungry and they love to tear apart the beehives looking for food!  Last year the bears tore up a couple hives before we could put the fencer on, and they really made a mess of things.   We have a very powerful electric fence guarding the bees.  It won't kill the bears, but they sure don't like it!
     We are very fortunate that we are not in a flooding zone.  Many farmers in the Red River Valley near Fargo have flooded fields, and they are very much behind schedule for planting.   Our yard is still soft and waterlogged, but the warm temps this weekend and next week should make everything nice for us to get back to work here on Honey B Farm!

The last of the jars of maple syrup I canned up this afternoon.  Twenty-six more jars!

A close-up of a beautiful jar of maple syrup!  It is clear and just the right color.  We filter our syrup through 3 pre-filters, an orlon filter and a wool felt filter to get this nice and clear.

The plants in my living room are more than ready for setting out. 

All the snow is gone now and I am ready for yard work and planting in my greenhouse.   The pile of dirt to the left of the greenhouse is good composted manure I got from a local farmer.  Some of it will go into the greenhouse and the rest will be scattered over the main garden.

Harold spent the afternoon cleaning up beehive boxes and getting ready for the new bees which will be coming in early May.

No Spring This Year?

Well, we got dumped on with snow again.  Yesterday we had a huge blizzard which dumped about a foot of snow on us.  It is still snowing out there now!     The high winds have drifted the snow into deep drifts again, and we are snowed in.   A few days ago we were looking at grass for the first time in months, and a somewhat dry driveway.    But now we have another foot of snow to melt into mud again.   This is just too depressing for words!  Up here in the north country we are beginning to think that we live in a sort of "twilight zone" of never-ending winter!  By mid April the farmers are usually in the fields working things up.  But this year the fields were flooded before this snow, so this will only add to the flooding.   Many areas of Fargo and surrounding towns are flooded in places.   We sure need some sunshine and warm weather!!  Will we ever see spring?

The driveway is drifted in again.  I guess we will have to get the snow shovel out one more time.

The cats are snowed in again, too.  It is difficult to feed them, as there is just no place to put their food dishes.  Even when I shovel out a place, the winds and blowing snow fling their food dishes all over the yard. The inside of their shelter is also filled with snow. 

First Batch of Maple Syrup for the Year!

Today we finished off and canned up our first batch of maple syrup from what we collected the other day.   The season is just getting started.  Today we ended up with 11 and 1/2 pints of finished syrup.   Early batches of syrup like this are very sweet, and not too heavy a maple flavor.   The maple flavor increases as the season progresses, and the syrup becomes slightly less sweet.   We like to sell something somewhere in the middle of the season.   This first product is what we keep for ourselves and to give away.  We did not get freezing temps last night, so the sap didn't run today.   But tonight the weathermen are predicting a good freeze, so tomorrow we should be able to collect quite a bit of sap.   We discovered that this year's ratio of sap to finished product is about 32 to 1, instead of 40 to 1.    This ratio varies from year to year.   Our neighbor claims his ratio was 28 to 1.  It is hard to calculate the exact ratio. 

Pancakes tonight for supper!!

Eleven pints of finished maple syrup!

A close-up of one of the jars.    This first batch was only filtered through an orlon filter and 3 pre-filters.  Normally we filter through all this, PLUS a wool filter, but I didn't want to dirty the hard-to-clean wool filter just for this small batch.  Filtering through all three kinds of filters produces a very clear product, much clearer than this one.

Tomorrow's sap collection will be much easier on us.   We got a large amount of rain the other evening, and some temps in the upper 50's, so a lot of the snow melted.   In the woods, the snow is probably only 6 inches deep now.   We can handle that!

We're Cooking Now!

Today we got the maple evaporator, buckets and tanks cleaned and ready to go.  Then we gathered about 50 gallons of sap.  This will only make a little over a gallon of finished syrup - perhaps 11 or 12 finished pints - but this was all we could handle today.  The snow is still deep, and now it has become like granulated slush, very difficult to walk in.   We just about wore ourselves out gathering the 50 gallons.   Every year Harold and I tell ourselves "we're getting too old for this".  But next year we do it again.   This is the first big exercise after getting too soft all winter long.   And exercise this is!  Hauling heavy sap pails through the deep slush without spilling anything or falling is a challenge.   With the deep snow cover we have no idea what we are stepping on in the woods, and hidden stumps and logs could be everywhere to trip us up!  I did fall once...........but fortunately my buckets were empty. 
     The sap will not be running for a couple days now, as the weather will be too warm.   But starting next Tuesday or Wednesday it will be running full tilt again.   Before then, we hope to tap more trees.
     Even the yard is a muddy mess.   The temps got up to 50 degrees today and water was running like rivers everywhere in the yard.  Even my greenhouse has a couple inches of water in it along one side.   A person has to wear boots at all times and hope you don't slip on the muddy lawn.   Ah......the joys of mud season!

Harold waves to the camera from the maple camp.   Notice the steam coming off the sap evaporator - we are really boiling away sap!  It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of finished syrup, so there is lots of boiling to do.   We feed the fire with wood.   This year Harold is using slab wood that he got for free from an Amish sawmill.   I would have gotten closer to the area for a nicer photo, but I didn't feel like fighting the muddy yard!  This is about 300 feet from the house and it was all my zoom lens could handle.

As we were walking through the paths in the woods, we saw that the deer had really bitten off lots of small saplings  It was a tough winter for them, too.   There were piles of deer droppings everywhere, more than I have ever seen.   Just about every small tree had branches nipped off.  Fortunately young trees can survive this and keep growing.  There will be maple trees for future generations.   I always wonder if today's young folks will continue this time honored tradition of making maple syrup?  So far, no young folks seem to be interested in learning this.  Such a shame.  Our neighbor is boiling away sap today, too.   And so far no younger folks have expressed any interest in learning from him either.     Will future generations just eat the chemical based corn syrup stuff?   I sure hope not!  There is nothing better than pure maple syrup on pancakes and waffles! (A close second is wild chokecherry syrup, and that is an art to make, too!)

Kicking Into High Gear Now!

For the last week or so we have been very busy getting ready for maple syrup making and also the garden.   We still have about 2 feet of snow on the ground, but the roads are clear of snow and the sap is running.   Harold got his tractor fixed and put back together.  The weather is warming up a little, and my plants inside are large enough to transplant into bigger containers.

As soon as Harold got the tractor put back together, he went into the woods to make a path for getting around for maple syrup.  With the deep snow we couldn't get around without a pathway made.

I've been busy with my plants which are looking great!

Here I am planting cabbage seeds.  I started three flats of Gonzales cabbages, a variety that is only a 1 to 2 lb cabbage.  They are sweet, tasty, good sellers at the market, and just the right size for a recipe's worth of cabbage without a lot of leftovers.

A tray of peppers, badly in need of being re-potted into larger pots!

Two flats of beautiful looking geranium plants I grew from seed.  These will be in shades of pink, white and red, and will go into my Ferris Wheel planter outside. 

Today we fought the snow and tapped a few more trees.   It was difficult work in the deep snow.

My very fashionable (?) husband is drilling a hole in a maple tree.

The sugarbush path is very rough and deep.

Harold hammers in the stainless steel tap.

Before he can get the bag on the tree, the sap is beginning to run.   You can see it dripping here.

A couple of trees with taps and bags complete.  We make our own sap bags out of heavy duty plastic bait bags with a grommet at the top to hold a screw on the tree, and a reinforced slit in the back of the bag to fit over the tap.   A side slit is cut for ease of emptying the sap out of the bag.

We get around in the woods with our old 4WD pickup.  But we got stuck today and Harold had to pull the truck out of the deep snow with the tractor.

Part of our sugarbush is not too far from our house.   You can just see our house in the background.

The woods is pretty this time of year, even though the snow is deep.   It is so very quiet in the snowy woods - just an occasional winter songbird or crow to make noise.

Harold finishes one more tree and heads back to the truck.

Harold's sister has a cute rustic cabin in the woods.  Her property is next to ours.  We also tap trees on her land, as she lives in Oklahoma and comes up once in a while to stay here, usually in the fall.

This is what our driveway looks like now!  It is a horrible muddy mess, and difficult to drive on.  I greatly dislike the mud season!  Shoes and boots get extremely muddy, it's hard to keep floors clean, and sometimes there just isn't any place to walk!  All the snow melt adds to the mud.  

All the mud will clear up soon - like next month - but in the meanwhile we have to plan our trips to town carefully.   My little car doesn't handle this very well, so we end up driving the big gas hog truck everywhere.   Ah, the joys of living out in the wooded country!