Posts Tagged ‘maple syrup’
Spring Grazing
We are trying something different this year. Instead of confining the horses to the paddocks for a few weeks to protect new growth in the fields, we have left the gates open. The horses are getting a natural, gradual adjustment to fresh grass grazing this year instead of the controlled exposure we have done in the past, where we increase their access time in small increments each day.
At this point, it’s hard to see if this might negatively affect our fields in the way literature on the subject warns. I’m happier letting the horses’ digestive systems adjust to the transition from dry hay to green grass without our needing to control it.
I also like that they aren’t suffering the stress of confinement when they want to be out grazing in the fields.
For these thoroughbred mares who have been rescued from some dire situations in their lifetimes, seeing them so completely contented now is deeply rewarding.
Cyndie and I are heading out to a pancake breakfast at a local maple syrup producer this morning to purchase our annual supply of the sweetness. We bring our own wide-mouth Mason jars, and they fill them at a discount. We first learned this practice from the people who designed and installed our fences. They had to stop working on our property one day to go to the limited-run event and offered to bring us back some syrup.
I felt like I was engaged in some illicit activity when I met them at the end of our driveway, and they passed me two large, unlabeled jars filled with what looked like dark moonshine liquor or something, and then drove off. After one taste, we realized this was something that we needed to make a priority every year.
This morning, we are meeting the couple, Tom and Sue, at the pancake breakfast to catch up on each other’s lives and also reminisce about those months when they got to know us as the suburbanites making a leap into their world in rural Pierce County, WI. They taught us a lot at a time when we didn’t have a clue about how much we were about to learn.
It’s going to be sweet, in more ways than one.
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Syrup Again
Since moving to the country and discovering some of the local treasures around us, Cyndie has purchased pure maple syrup only once a year. It’s that time again! Just a few miles south of Ellsworth, the Stockwell family taps 35 acres of maple trees and collects enough gallons of sap to supply folks with a full year’s worth of syrup, if you have containers to hold it.
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We’ve figured out the routine and bring two 2-quart Mason jars to be placed under the spigot of the large tank and filled with the dark amber bliss every April during the S & S Sugar Bush open house pancake breakfast weekend.
It’s hard to find an event pancake breakfast that isn’t pretty darn good, be it firefighters, boy scouts, legions, or service clubs, but I gotta say the fresh, hot blueberry cakes, sausage, and pure maple syrup combination we enjoyed yesterday morning tasted about as good as I can recall ever experiencing.
Our friends Mike and Barb Wilkus accompanied us, having also joined us for the live Climate Cast at MPR Thursday night and then sleeping over to be available for the Sugar Bush open house. After the scrumptious breakfast, we took a stroll through the woods to witness the number of tapped trees that were supplying the sweet maple sap.
It is impressive to consider the hundreds of gallons of sap running up through the roots of these trees when the spring temperatures are just right —warm during the day and below freezing at night. One of the Stockwell sons described how the percent of sweetness drops in time, but his grandpa would collect the later sap for a vinegar.
The syrup open house has become so precious to us, Cyndie invited more friends to stop by today so she could go again and share the event with them, too. I reckon the delicious pancakes might have something to do with her zeal, as well.
There is another precious annual event that will be happening next week for us. For the second year in a row, Wintervale Ranch will be holding our own open house as a host site for The Labyrinth Society’s World Labyrinth Day Peace Walk. Walk as one at 1.
Around the world, at each location, people will walk and visualize peace at 1:00 p.m. in their time zones, creating a wave of peaceful energy flowing around the globe.
Cyndie has been working to spruce up our labyrinth, despite the lack of growth from the barely thawed landscape. I noticed when Barb and Mike were here and we did a moonlight walk Thursday night that the overnight freezing and daytime warm sunshine was still conspiring to tip over plenty of my rock arrangements.
It sounds like we can expect some rain showers this coming week, so maybe new growth will be exploding in spectacular glory for visitors on Saturday. If the day dawns nearly as spectacular as today, World Labyrinth Day will be a wonderful opportunity to experience the best of Wintervale Ranch.
If you are reading in the Twin Cities area, I hope you will consider joining us!
Saturday, May 5, 2018 between 12:00-3:00 p.m. Please email cyndie@wintervaleranch.com to register and receive directions.
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Leaky Tree
I’m reporting from a remote location this morning, having stayed a night in the cities to attend an event honoring students and staff at the old alma mater. Instead of driving home, only to turn around in a few hours to drive back to work, I spent the night at Cyndie’s parents’ house in Edina.
It was a real treat to see some of the accomplishments of the present-day people at Eden Prairie public schools. That is where both Cyndie and I graduated from, as well as both of our children, and where Cyndie worked as high school principal for several years.
The number of young, new-to-me faces of staff being given special recognition by the Foundation for EP Schools last night was inspiring, yet caused me to become acutely aware my advanced age. The years of our involvement seem like a really long time ago now.
At the same time, a few of the music teachers present were the same people who taught our children, and they were excited to pass along greetings to their former students. So, I guess it wasn’t that long ago.
It’s all relative, isn’t it?
Cyndie sent me pictures and stories of the antics of Cayenne sneaking through one of our web fences, twice!, yesterday; the chickens came in the barn and totally ignored the cheep-cheeping chicks; and the chicks are another day happier and healthier.
She also captured this picture of an impressive dual-pronged sap-cicle on a branch of one of our young maple trees. I don’t know why this one is leaking at that spot, but there is no mistaking the fact that the sap is flowing strong.
Syruping season is here.
It may not feel like spring yet, but when the pure maple syrup starts getting boiled down around these parts, nice weather can’t be far off.
I’m feeling ready for some of both.
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Harvesting Popsicles
It’s still February on the calendar, but our warm days have started the sap flowing in the trees already. As a result, the leaking wounds on our recently pruned maple trees are forming sap-sicles with a sublime sweetness and hint of maple flavor.
The daytime temperature yesterday reached the melting point and the mostly sunny sky created the magical act of disappearing snow. I pulled the drifted snow off the roof over the front door and along the valleys beneath the main peak and the shingles started steaming instantly as they absorbed the solar energy and warmed up.
I had started the day with a walk down the driveway to assess the condition and found it to be a frozen mess. The snow that fell during the second half of the storm, after I had plowed once, was melting into a slush that had re-frozen overnight into an un-plowable mass.
That shifted my morning focus to shoveling. By the time I got to plowing in the afternoon, much of the driveway was exposed pavement. I cleaned up the edges, battling to keep the blade from slicing into the soft turf, and then worked on the gravel section around the barn.
That was a trick. The snow was sticky and the gravel soft. The task gets a bit less forgiving, requiring more attention to detail than I really wanted to give it. It becomes a mental wrestle to convince myself the chore even needs to be done, and if so, how thorough to follow through.
Do I need to leave space for more snow to follow? Will this be melted and gone by the time we next receive another plowable amount of accumulation?
I parked the Grizzly in the sunshine to melt the snow off the blade while I pulled out a shovel to clean up the edges. That’s when some maple-sicles caught my eye.
The first bites at the bottom are the sweetest and the texture is softer than frozen water. There is no question that these are not typical icicles. The hint of maple flavor is a wonderful natural reward.
I wonder how many grams of sugar I added to my diet yesterday.
That’s not counting the icing I ate on the couple of pieces of Cyndie’s spice cake I snuck in…
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Sticky Sweet
Our three chestnuts had their heads out when I visited the barn on Thursday. Legacy was turned around with his butt to the door. We are so grateful to have this barn with stalls. It is obvious to us that they are, too. We have never once had any of them make a fuss over being confined inside.
Yesterday, everyone was back outside in the sunshine, after the fog burned off. Cyndie surprised me with a last-minute suggestion that we go out for breakfast before she went to work. It was the first day of a local syrup farm’s open house event, and they were serving pancakes with fresh blueberries!
They also provide free maple-syrup sundaes, so I had ice cream for dessert first thing in the morning, too. It was pure sticky, sweet goodness.
We learned last year that you can bring your own containers and purchase syrup at a discount. We bought a gallon in two Ball jars, brought from home. It’s that good, and it’s easy to keep. Since it wasn’t sealed in these containers, we’ll refrigerate it.
We are still “new” folks here, meaning we weren’t born and raised in the area, and that shows when you attend an event like this where everyone else knows each other well. Since it was a weekday, the primary crowd we encountered were retirees and their parents. I’m sure we appeared out of place, but we were doted on just the same.
After pancakes, Cyndie dashed off to work, leaving me to chat about the syrup season (it was average), and the art and science of knowing when to start tapping trees. If you try too early, while time passes until the sap runs, the tree will have been busy healing the spot where the tap was inserted. If you start too late, you miss some of the sweetest, best sap for syrup.
I killed a little time in the morning, working indoors while waiting for things to dry out as much as possible, then headed out to see if I could mow more of the fields. It was borderline, as some spots still have standing water.
I forged ahead regardless and ended up cutting what I could, working around the wettest spots. Based on the forecast, it could be my last chance to mow for quite a while…
Just as predicted, the rain has brought out the greenest of greens in the lawn and portion of the back grazing field where I did the first cutting last week. It makes it look like the areas cut yesterday don’t match, but I’m confident they will come around soon enough. I was concerned that these remaining areas all had thicker grass already, and that is causing more piles of cuttings that get left behind. This should become less obvious before long, though.
I’m all about the aesthetic impression aligning with my goal of better grass. I believe this will improve the forage in our fields, but at the very least, I would like it to look like improved forage. If nothing more, I would enjoy having that justification for spending all this time out there trying to mow farm acres with a lawn tractor.
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Relative Something 