Syrup season has arrived. My dad taps a few trees in my Grandmother's woods. (Few being a relative term when it takes an average of 40 gallons of sap to make one of syrup) We all went out to help today. The weather was beautiful for it, not too cold in the woods, but cold enough that only the tractor broke through the snow into the mud.
Dad tapped the trees and we hung the buckets and placed the lids. Kate drew pictures in the snow, kicked ice into the mud puddles and the dogs ran around sniffing deer poo and bothering each other. Everyone had a wonderful time.
Kate demonstrated her usual level of patience in waiting for the sap to run, but lucky for her, she didn't have long to wait today. There were a few times that the sap dripped on the snow before we could get a bucket under it.
Dad mostly does things the old fashioned way with his syrup, but we have a few modern conventions:
These bags are much easier to find in the woods than the buckets and there's less clean up, as the bags are not used year to year, but we discovered when we had to assemble them in the snow today that we much prefer the buckets anyway. Despite that, I suppose there's no stopping progress; here's the gentleman farmer in the midst of his syrup industry...
So the sap's arising and the socks are not finished. A shame since they are for dad and he could use a pair of wool socks in his boots right now.
1 comment:
This is great! Nice to see the famous syruping process I've always heard about from you. :-) What a cool way to spend time with family. Love the bags!
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