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.

Wood harvest

This winter has been milder than last winter so far. We have more than half of our wood left. We burned through all of the wood we bought and are burning the wood we cut last winter. We started harvesting dead trees off our land for next winters firewood so it has several months to dry and cure. My husband cuts and bucks the tree and I haul the logs and stack them. Winter weather of 20 degrees is the perfect temp to do this sort of work, no bugs and you stay nice and cool.

This pile is from two aspen trees, one of which the wood peckers were going after and we split open part of it to discover a colony of frozen flying ants, it was pretty neat.

I have been busy sewing baby bibs and revamping my etsy shop. https://www.etsy.com/shop/handmadebynikki057?ref=search_shop_redirect 
I also was able to connect with a local gift shop to sell my baby bibs there. I am continuing to network and connecting with local people about the summer events and craft shows.

I taught my second class through community ed. It was DIY body care products. We made champagne whipped body butter, alpine sea salt foot scrub with juniper oil and rose clay mud mask. I also threw in some of my homemade sea salt caramels. My class sizes have been small but the student reviews have been positive. I hope they continue to grow. It seems like small towns are always looking for new people to teach their skills through community education. If you have cool skills give teaching a try.

 

 There was a cold snap for a few days so I got busy crafting. I made an earring holder out of a frame and some scrap chicken wire I got from the neighbor. Now I can hang my earrings and not keep them in a giant pile. 

My son and I kept busy doing science, we made fake snow and gak. My son loved the fake snow and thought the gak was too weird. I will post the recipes below. Both of these projects can be kept in a plastic zip lock bag after and used again.

http://www.funathomewithkids.com/2014/11/magic-puffing-snow-recipe.html

http://www.pbs.org/parents/crafts-for-kids/gak-attack/

Chaga

I went for a short winter hike on my property and found some chaga mushroom on my birch tree. I have never found chaga before so I took some pics and consulted a local mycologist to be sure I had identiified it correctly. It sort of looks like rotten wood or bear poop. He confirmed it was chaga.

What is Chaga?   

from:https://www.annandachaga.com/pages/frontpage

"The Chaga mushroom is a unique polypore fungi that grows on living birch trees. A symbiotic relationship is formed between the Chaga mushroom and its host that can sustain one another during their entire lifespan of up to 20 years. 

Chaga Mushrooms may be found on wounded or dying white birch trees in temperate forests around the northern hemisphere. Chaga looks like encrusted black formations; the sterile conk or mycelium grows out of wounds sustained after storms and other impacts that break branches.  Chaga covers the tree's wound and protects it from invading micro organisms.  The host tree and the Chaga can co-exist for many years and the mushroom can be harvested up to three times over the course of its lifetime.  

The Chaga Mushrooms is known as the "King of Medicinal Mushrooms."  Considered by many cultures as one of the most powerful healing plants on Earth and used for centuries in Traditional Chinese Medicine.  After it as been harvested, the Chaga needs to be air dried and broken into chunks or ground into a course or fine powder.  The outer cell walls of Chaga are protected by chitin and need to be broken down or extracted.  Over the centuries chaga has been extracted by steeping it in hot water to make a medicinal Chaga Mushroom Tea or matured into a potent Chaga Mushroom Extract by soaking it in alcohol.  Both the hot water and alcohol methods over long periods of time help to dissolve the chitin protecting the valuable nutritional contents inside the Chaga. 

Chaga Mushrooms have been known to improve the immune response, lower blood sugar levels and combat abnormal cell growth.  Chaga is also anti-inflammatory, relieves pain and purifies the blood and the liver."

I found a saw and cut my chaga off the birch tree. I brought it inside and sawed it into chunks. It was very hard, not soft and spongy like regular mushrooms. I took all the powder from sawing the chunks and stuck it in a jar with vodka to make tincture.

In three weeks I will be able to strain it. I have also been playing around with steeping it for tea. The first batch I steeped 3 chunks in hot water for 1 day. The second batch I have been steeping 6 chunks for 3 days now and increased the water volume. The tea itself doesn't taste bad at all. I like to mix it 50/50 with my other teas I drink. I gave some to a friend of mine that likes mushrooms.

I am surprised with how much my property is proving us in wild edibles and medicinal plants. The more I walk my property and learn the more I find.

Killing time

**WARNING: This post contains graphic photos of dead animals. If you don’t eat meat, I respect that decision, and you won’t hurt my feelings if you skip reading this post. However, my family and I have made the choice eat meat because protein is not only healthy but it tastes good, and I ask you to respect our choices as well. Comments left with the intention of starting a fight or being an asshole will be deleted.

Well I did it, I killed two roosters. It was gross but I did it. If I had to kill another small animal to feed my family I know now I could. I might barf but I could feed my son.
 A friend of mine, T, called me saying she had two roosters she wanted to get rid of and asked if I would like them to eat. I could not pass up on free meat. The only catch I had to slaughter and clean them. I thought "Ok how are you going to figure this out." I called another friend, R, she keeps chickens for eggs and meat and she agreed to teach me how to slaughter them and I offered her some bars of my home made soap for payment for her time. I have never been around chickens before, growing up in the suburbs I always purchased chicken from the grocery store, nice and neat and ready to cook and eat. I found two cat carriers, leather gloves and headed over to T's house with my son. I thought it was important for my son to be 100% aware of what mom was going to do. I told him,"Mom is going to pick up two chickens, she will kill them and we will eat them later." I got to T's house and I had no idea how to even hold a chicken let alone catch one. I'm sure we looked like two weirdos on a comedy show trying to capture these chickens. After about 10 minutes they were in the crates in the back of my jeep.

I arrived at R's house with a dread in me, sort of like a nervousness, like what the fuck did I agree to do. But I could not back out, I mean what was I going to do with two live roosters with no infrastructure to house them. I could not just come home and tell my husband, " SURPRISE!!! Honey we are going to raise chickens starting today!" R got the hatchet out and these lobbers. She told me I had to do the killing myself. I grabbed the hatchet, it was in need of a good sharpening but I made it work. She told me that if I hold the rooster by the feet upside down they don't flail around as much. Then she directed me to the chopping block. I laid the chicken down and hacked its head off. It flapped around without its head. I kept holding on to it as it bled out. I felt like I was a witch from the Salem, MA days about to do some sort of cool spell. I got the second rooster and repeated it.

Next step was R went inside and got her boiling pot of water and poured it into a bucket. She dipped each chicken into the boiling water but was careful not to leave it too long. Then dipped it into the  cold water bucket.

Plucking came next. She did not have a fancy plucking machine. It had to be done by hand. She had an old swing set that had several strings with slip knots tied in them that we placed around the chicken feet. When she slaughters chickens she does several at a time from the looks of it. R placed a wheelbarrow under the chickens to catch the feathers. I kept my leather gloves on and started pulling feathers out as she showed me. I actually thought this part was easy, just a little tedious.

Now the chickens are ready to go inside and have the innards removed. This was the gross part. There was an oil glad by the tail feather that needed to be removed. There is a little pouch  at the neck that needs to be removed and then the guts and organs. R looked at me and said,"You need to use your finger nail to scrape out the lungs." I got all hot and nauseous. I had to turn away and gag. R had to finish up both chickens.

Next step was to wash and bag them. They got cooked down into chicken stock.

A different friend R called me and said her husband got a deer during hunting season and did not have room in their freezer for all of it. She asked if we would be interested in some meat. Again, I could not pass up on free meat so I accepted and when I arrived at her house she had two hind legs of the deer wrapped and waiting for me. I was surprised and how large deer legs are.

My husband and I each broke down our own leg of the deer. We cut some steaks and a roast. The rest we brought it for burger meat and summer sausage

I cut and saved a lot of the fat to make soap with it. I made one sample batch so far and it turned out nice.

We also had several days of extreme cold weather. A couple mornings it was -20 degrees F with -35 windchill. When I was splitting wood I ended up with ice on my bangs and eyelashes.

The sun rises during the cold snap was really cool with hot pinks and purples behind the birch trees.

My son had another birthday and I made him a dinosaur cake. It was my first time making and using a ganache. I'm really happy with the way it turned out as the frosting.

First time on ice skates.