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"