Maple Syrup

I love producing our own Maple Syrup.  There is something so satisfying about going through such a long process; tapping, gathering, boiling off in two stages, preserving, for something so incredibly yummy.  This year I really didn't do much except act as cheerleader, encouraging everyone else to keep at it.  This year Chris made candy and maple sugar.  Wow was that good.  In total it was ten litres of liquid gold. At the rate it gets eaten I don't know if it will get us through the year.

Ducks! We have Ducks!

The first time we went to the farm store to find out about having chickens we learned about the huge variety of birds you could order.  Varieties of chickens, turkeys, ducks, peacocks, and geese oh my! Just having the option of raising ducklings was enough to plant the seed.  Now that the new chickens have settled in, we were ready for our two day old Rouen ducks.  Wow are they ever cute. CUTE! They are so soft, tiny and incredibly cute.  They are yellow and black at the moment, covered in down.  When they are full grown they will look very similar to Mallards.
We don't really know much about raising ducks.  As is our way, we are just learning as we go along.  They ducks will stay in an aquarium as until they get too large under a heat lamp.  Amazingly baby ducks don't know how to swim right away, so we need to ease them into shallow water and build up their swimming strength.  Its a good thing they loved being held close because as you can imagine they are getting lots of love!
It's another wonderful adventure having ducks.  

The added bonus

Our ultimate goal of tapping the trees and boiling the sap is obviously to produce some of our own maple syrup. It is a time consuming process, especially in our small pot. Without a doubt it is time well spent. The process of building and maintaining the fire, skimming off the syrup, refilling the pot for many, many hours at a time has led way to other wonderful rewards.

We head outside at first to tend to our tasks, but the sun and warmth keep us out. There was ice collected for winter fairy houses, hockey played. The swings were enjoyed, lunch roasted, snowball fights had. We tried our hand at bannock on a stick, which was a huge hit. The process involved in making sap together as a family is one we cherish, but just as much is the time spent together outside just hanging out. Or maybe the bonus is that for days on end we all smell like campfire!

Sweet Water

Cold crisp nights, warm sunny days, which means the sap is running. We put up our three buckets last week and since then have gathered about 8 buckets full sap! It is amazing how much sap drips, which I guess is a good thing considering the sap/syrup ration (about 18litres to 1 litre). This weekend we began boiling off the sap. We have a tripod set up over our fire pit and we continually fill a pot hung over the fire. There is so much sap and our process isn't as quick as it would be if we had a large flat tray for the boil off, but it works and its what we have at the moment. It just means we will be boiling for days to come....maybe even weeks. The reward for all the hard work and fire maintaining happens to be sweet enough!