It is always nice to pull out of that winter slump, step outdoors and feel the hot sun on your face.
But Spring is a mixed blessing, as comes the heat so does the work!
As many of my readers will know I live on an organic farm and it is the goal of my family to become entirely self-sufficient and produce all our own food. As the season progresses I will be sharing some of our experiences here and on our journey back to real food.
This weekend was an interesting one; I'm sure most of you are familiar with the delicious Canadian treat - maple syrup. Well now is the 'tree tapping' season, when you begin to harvest sap from maple trees and reduce it until it forms maple syrup. It was an interesting experience and one relatively new to all of us, this being the second time our family has done it. We started off by tapping the trees; basically making a small hole about half an inch wide and inserting a small plastic tube attached to a bucket. As the sap makes its way up from the roots it begins to drip down and fill the bucket, which is later emptied and the sap boiled.
So day by day we would bring the buckets into our kitchen from the forest and reduce the sap. The smell in the house was incredible. New to our knowledge was how to get a different quality of syrup(usually judged by colour). Contrary to our previous beliefs darker maple syrup is not reduced farther but rather comes from later on in the season when the sugar content of sap changes from mainly fructose sugars to sucrose sugars. Strangely the difference in flavour was astounding. The darker syrup usually goes for a bit more money and there is no question why. The flavour was much stronger and the syrup much sweeter.
Another thing we learned was how hard it is to make maple syrup. It takes just about forty liters of sap to make one liter of syrup. Don't be worried though, a tree pumps many many times this a day and tapping trees does not damage them in any way. So this is how we spent our weekend on organics farm and in all honesty I had a blast. It was a great experience for all of us and one thing is for sure, tasting homemade maple syrup is like nothing else!
