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!