Schooling & Maple Sap

I was reading that Wisconsin has 4 seasons: Winter Season, Summer Season, Deer Season and Mud Season. This made me laugh because I think it might be correct. I would get rid of Summer Season and replace it with Mosquito Season. A couple weeks ago it got up into the 40s and all of our snow melted and our yard and drive way turned into mud pit again. We had to park the vehicles on the road to keep from making ruts on the driveway. The warm weather made me think about Maple Syrup!!! I tapped my trees and sap was just pouring out of the drilled holes.

Drip by drip to fill the bag.

I attached the blue sap collecting bags and by the next day they were already half full.

After 2 hours.

After 2 hours.

Just as a reminder, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. I still have many more gallons to collect.

 Thanks to a tip from my coffee shop buddy I went to the grocery store and asked the Deli for their old vegetable oil jugs. Each jug is 5 gallons and easier to pour out then the 5 gallon buckets I used last year I will fill these jugs with sap to store it until boiling day.

The temperature dropped and the last 4 days it has been about 0 degrees over night and 15 degrees as a high. This means my sap is frozen in the bags and that sap has stopped flowing.

Now I am getting spring fever and want it to warm up a bit for sap collecting and I'm getting annoyed with wearing my winter jacket all the time.

It has been a busy few weeks fled with bees, gardening and Thai cooking classes. My friend and I took a bee keeping class at the Universoty of Minnesota.

It was an 8 hour course and we learned about hive dynamics, bee life cycle, mites and dieases, bee keeping gear, getting stung/ allergic reactions how to paint and stack the boxes and how to collect honey.  Eveything seems great but I really want to work with an established bee keeper before I buy my equipment. Not to mention its about $400 to get all the gear and box of bees to start out with. Actually more  money because I need to figure out a bear proof solution. One solution  is electro fencing in the hive but a friend's husband brought up how bees can sting a bear but it doesn't care and keeps eating honey so it could plow right though electro fence if it wanted to. He suggested maybe a tall chain link dog kennel and putting the bees inside of that. The bear could still climb in if it wanted to. The best part of the whole bee keeping class was my friend taking me out on a date to a wonderful restaurant filled with fantastic food and multiple glasses of wine.



I started a Master Gardener class. This course is 13 weeks long and I have to complete 24 volunteer hours to get my certificate.

I'm very excited to volunteer and work with kids again in the school garden but without all of the bureaucracy and paper work that was need when I was an Americorps volunteer. We will be learning about botany, soil health, disease and many other subjects over the next 13 weeks.

My son and I made a fairy house out of some cut wood from the dead tree harvest. My son picked out all of the figurines. He placed everything where he wanted it and I hot glued everything down. I let him sort through my tiny agates, he used them to make a walking path. It was a very fun project. Now he wants to make a "spooky troll house"

Pruning

 The dead tree harvest continues. This huge aspen could have fallen on the house in a big storm so it came down. The top half was dead.

















Its fruit tree pruning season in my part of the country. I know absolutely nothing about pruning trees except you are suppose to do it while they are dormant.  I sat down and spent about an hour reading up on it and watching a few different you tube videos. From what I gathered the whole point of pruning is to 1) to create light exposure for both leaves and fruit; 2) provide uniform distribution of fruiting branches; 3) control the size of the tree; 4) reduce limb breakage due to heavy fruit loads; and 5) produce high quality fruit of good size. I really didn't have to do that much, I sniped a couple branches growing sideways back through the tree. I didn't want to go all crazy and hack apart my trees.

Last fall we were all tapped out of money so we had about $35 budget for a tree fence to protect them from deer. We purchased plastic trunk protectors and built a thrifty fence out of 6ft tall spikes and fishing line with soda cans hanging form it. We tapped in the spikes and wrapped the fishing line around the perimeter of the orchard area at three different levels. Then hung a few soda cans around the fence.

The fishing line is hard to see but its tied on at three different heights.

Yes, I know this is totally insane we live in the middle of the woods with deer tracks in our yard. I know nothing about deer behavior or eating habits beyond they like to eat corn in the fields and ate all of our pumpkins in the garden I volunteered at. The fence is working, we have not had a problem all winter. Or maybe because we compost our toilet waste they smell it and stay away. Who knows!!!!

Next project is we tiled the back splash in the kitchen. The company that installed the counter top warned us to get it done asap to avoid mold growing on the sheet rock. I thought it would be a great winter project. Tiling is annoying. Mostly because you have to be bent over in a weird way applying tiles under the cabinets. I struggled with getting the mud on thin enough.

The other annoying part was measuring and making tiny cuts to fit around the outlets. I had my husband do all the cutting with the saw. We have a really cool neighbor that has a whole collection of tools that he loans us, the saw is one of them. I thought it was going to be a quick 2 hour job, nope, 6 hours later it was completed. I am really happy with the way it turned out. It gives the kitchen some texture to distinguish it from the rest of the house.


My husband made a cat toy. He had my son collect a stick and tied the very end of a squirrel tail onto a it. I think its a little creepy.