Dawn breaks over our fields of brand new hay.
Category Archives: Country life
Shoe tree
In the city, shoes dangling over the wires mean you might not be in the greatest neighbourhood. Out here in the country, we do things a little differently. Although I’m not sure what the meaning is of the shoe tree.
Literally, a tree covered in shoes.
There are fancy shoes and casual shoes. Big shoes and little shoes.
Sandle shoes and boot shoes and fuzzy shoes.
And of course, Canadian shoes.
I think the fact that we have a shoe tree says less about the neighbourhood and more about the people who live here.
Crazy country folk.
Icy Easter
Hello. How was your weekend? Did you have a good Easter?
Our Easter weekend ended up being extra long thanks to an ice storm that rolled through our area on Thursday. The storm closed both Matt’s and my work and turned off our electricity for 9 hours.
By Good Friday, the freezing rain had stopped, but temperatures had not risen, and a thick coating of ice covered everything.
Just days into spring, and our lilacs had their new green growth encased in ice.
The ground was covered in ice chunks from the trees and bushes.
Icicles dripped off the back of the bird feeder and at the front there was a steady queue for the only food available.
In the garden, icicles hung from the top fence rail and the chainlink was augmented with its own icy shield.
Fortunately, we didn’t have much damage. The worst was losing just a few branches off the pine trees.
The weight of the ice is incredible. Normally, we can walk easily under these branches that are touching the ground.
Down the driveway, more branches overhung far enough that Baxter could reach them.
Temperatures finally started to rise on Saturday afternoon. Ice slid off the roofs and the cars in sheets. Slowly the branches returned to their usual heights as the trees shed their icy casings, shards shattering into the ground.
By yesterday, Easter Sunday, the farm was back to normal.
What was the weather like where you are? Did you do anything special this weekend? How did you celebrate Easter?
Sweet times on the farm
I looooove maple syrup. Growing up, every spring my parents went to a Mennonite farm and bought gallons of pure maple syrup. Then they put it into containers and froze it, so we had it for the whole year. It was always a sad day late in the winter when we ran out of syrup.
Sorry, Aunt Jemima, you’re just not for me.
You can imagine how excited I am to be making our own maple syrup this year.
We jumped right in to tapping our trees with little thought to how we’d transform the sap into syrup. A lot of what I saw online talked about evaporators or cauldrons over fires. Pretty much everything said, “Do not boil sap indoors.”
We have neither an evaporator nor a cauldron, however. Nor did we have a ton of sap, so Matt and I threw caution to the wind and decided we were going to boil our sap inside on the stove. Daring, I know.
We selected some large pots–including our big roasting pan, dumped in the sap, set the burners to high and turned on the exhaust fan to suck out the steam. And you know what? It totally worked!
On an average evening, we found about 12 litres of sap was a good quantity. It fit in our pots easily and didn’t fill the house with too much steam. After boiling for about 3 and a half hours, the sap had transformed into syrup.
At first we just judged by colour and flavour, but Matt progressed to measuring the temperature. He found online that 218ºF (103ºC or so) was the magic number.
Tip to anyone who wants to try making syrup indoors, we used the soup pot as a finishing pot and transferred the sap from the roasting pan into the soup pot for the last half hour of boiling
The ratio for sap to syrup that we found online was 40:1, and that was our experience too. 12 litres (12,000mL) of sap made about 1 1/2 cups (375mL of syrup).
This picture shows another neat thing I’ve learned about syrup. I knew it came in different grades or colours, but I thought it was just the amount of boiling time that determined what grade your syrup was. It turns out it’s early versus late in the season. The jar on the left is from our second boil, and the one on the right is our fourth. See how the colour is subtly darker in the older syrup?
An aside about these old Crown canning jars. How perfect is the made in Canada label?
I’m loving having maple syrup again. It’s sweetened a lovely pumpkin soup, made a beautiful golden topping on vanilla ice cream (one of my favourite ways to eat it) and of course added just what was missing to my favourite meal of the day, breakfast.
I’m trying to be a bit frugal and not eat it all at once. We already have two full jars in the freezer, so I’m hoping to remember my childhood and make it stretch as long as I possibly can.
Are there any other maple syrup snobs out there? Have you ever made your own syrup? Any tips to share–whether for inside or outside boiling? Do you have a favourite maple syrup recipe?
Getting sappy
We have a new project for these last few days of winter. We’re tapping our maple trees!
I picked up a basic starter kit at the hardware store. It came with five buckets, five lids and five spiles.
Thankfully the kit also came with instructions on how to get started. We selected trees that were the right size, drilled holes, stuck the spiles in, and watched the magic happen.
The sap started flowing as soon as we drilled the holes. Matt was impatient saying, “Stop taking pictures! We’re wasting sap!” (Picture Kermit arm flailing). The maple syrup has totally turned into Matt’s thing.
The spiles, buckets and lids all hook together in a pretty simple system. The sap travels up the tree, into the spile and then drips into the bucket.
The sap run this year hasn’t been terrific. Last week temperatures shot up, and I had high hopes for a a lot of sap. However, the temperatures were so high that even night was above freezing. Apparently cold nights are critical for sap.
However, we have had a few good days where Matt had to empty the buckets several times.
To collect the sap, Matt takes my biggest stock pot outside and empties the buckets into the pot. Then in the house we strain the sap to get out any dirt or bugs or twigs and put it in big containers in the fridge until we’re ready to move on to the syrup stage–which I’ll talk about in my next post.
Have you ever tapped trees? Are you trying anything new this time of year? What’s your big spring project?
Thisclose to a breakthrough
I’ve had this whole “break-on-through” post that I’ve been planning. You see, all winter I’ve been working my way through our woodpile. It’s three rows wide, and I’ve been slowly using up the back two rows. (Matt, the official woodcutter in our relationship, would argue it’s not been slow enough).
Well, I was almost at the end. I had snapped some pictures showing how far I’d come, anticipating the day when I would break through.
Then I would take my final pictures and write a blog post where I talk about how happy I am that we have a fireplace, how nice it’s been to have fires all winter, how it’s almost the end of winter and how neat it is that this breakthrough moment coincides with almost the end of fire season, how we (Matt) will have to restock our firewood in anticipation of next winter.
I had it all worked out in my mind.
But then something happened. Cave in.
There will be no breakthrough.
There will be restacking, more burning (sorry, Matt). And instead you get this blog post, mourning what could have been, rather than triumphantly celebrating a milestone.
Okay, maybe milestone isn’t the best descriptor, but I’d worked it all out, people!
I blame the turkey.
Her footprints are all around that woodpile.
El Niño
Are you having a crazy winter where you are? We’ve been through El Niños before, but this year is something else.
Temperatures have mostly hovered right around zero or above. It took nearly half the winter before we had snow of any significance.
But it only lasted a little while before the temperatures shot up again and everything melted. (Note how even the grass has maintained its green).
Every so often, temperatures drop back into the polar vortex territory that we experienced for the previous two winters. But then they invariably rise again.
The wildlife is not reacting well to the fluctuations.
We had an extra cat take refuge in the barn. And snakes are coming out of their dens only to freeze in the snow.
On behalf of the local wildlife, Ralph came out of the barn to investigate where winter went.
“No, I don’t believe I see any snow on this ground here.”
Not trusting his sister’s bad eye, Bax came to help her look.
“Nope, I do not see any snow either… And I think I’m sitting in mud.” (He was.)
A month from today we will officially be into spring. Do you think we’re going to have a winter between now and then?
What’s winter been like where you are? Are you seeing any unusual wildlife behaviours? Anyone want to join Ralph’s and Baxter’s search party?
A Mexican vacation
Lest you’re confused by the title of today’s post, no, Matt and I have not left the farm for southern climes. Sarah in Illinois did, and she’s come back to make us all jealous share her honeymoon adventures with us.
I know of no better way to break up the cold days of winter than to head south. And that is just what Steve and I did. We combined a vacation, our honeymoon, my birthday and Valentine’s Day into a six-day stay in Cancun Mexico.
We stayed at the all-inclusive Moon Palace Golf Resort and Spa. I cannot say enough about our stay. The staff was amazing, we visited with other guests from London, Canada, Norway, and a few from the States, the food was great with more choices than we could try while we were there. And of course, the drinks never stopped.
The only thing that I would change was that we had two days of cool weather and overcast skies, but of course, there is nothing that can be done about that. And as they say, a bad day at the beach is better than a good day at work, right?
The view from our room
Our room was ocean front and included a jacuzzi. Believe me when I say, I am not used to that kind of luxury. We spent each day almost the same way. We woke up and went to buffet breakfast where we tried some new things but preferred the made to order omelets. We found some empty lounge chairs on the beach and our biggest worry was how long until the waitress came back with our drinks and what should we have for lunch.
Birthday breakfast: made to order omelet and a Bloody Mary!
The area had several sites that we could visit. And we discussed going to see Cozumel or Playa del Carmen. But Steve and I have had a lot of stress the past two months, and we both decided that all we wanted to do was soak up the sun (when it came out) and listen to the waves crash. It truly was relaxing.
On Saturday, my birthday, the sun was again hiding and so we went to the “Hotel Zone” where there were plenty of shops. We bought souvenirs for family, and Steve bought me a new purse. We stopped for cervesa (beer in Spanish, the word that Steve learned first at Hooter’s) and then headed back to our hotel.
We told the hotel that we were on our honeymoon, and they gave us a complimentary dinner on the beach. We didn’t know what to expect, but we were so extremely surprised. Dinner was salad, onion soup (that was amazing) and then filet mignon. We had wine and champagne. Yes, the hotel outdid themselves.
On our last full day the sun was in and out of the clouds all day. We spent some more time on our chairs but decided to go do something.
The hotel had small two-person catamarans that we took out on the ocean. Neither of us had ever attempted to sail anything before so there was a bit of learning curve, and we didn’t always agree on how to do it, but after a while we did really get the hang of it.
The next thing we tried was stand up paddle boards. Oh my goodness that was hilarious. I think we had both had too many cervesas to attempt anything with balance. But we were in shallow water with life jackets on so the only thing we hurt was our ribs from laughing.
Later in the afternoon we rented a sea-doo and followed the guide out in the ocean. We went a long, long way out into the ocean, where we could barely see our hotel back at the beach and the guide had us get off on a shallow sandbar. It was so cool to be so far out in the ocean just standing in shallow water.
Our final dinner at the resort was at a Brazilian restaurant. We both really stepped out of our comfort zone to try it. The waiter came around to our table repeatedly and offered Canadian bacon, turkey, flank steak, chicken, Brazilian steak and I am not sure what else.
I will admit, it wasn’t our favorite meal, but we were happy that we tried something new. And we ended the dinner with Key Lime pie for me, cheesecake for Steve and Mayan coffee, which came with a little show of fire, and alcohol. It was so much fun. I am sorry that I didn’t take more pictures, but I am glad I enjoyed it first-hand rather than worrying whether I caught the right shot.
Steve and I both swear we are not going to take four years until we go on our next vacation. It was long overdue, and completely relaxing. I only hate that we came home to blowing snow.
What a quick way to end the glow of a beach vacation!
Where do you like to take your vacation? Any beach lovers out there? Anyone been to Cancun? Have any suggestions for our next trip?
Sounds wonderful, Sarah! Your Valentine’s Day was a definite contrast to our -20ºC temperatures. It’s been a few years since I’ve visited a beach in the middle of winter, and you’re bringing back some good memories. For your second honeymoon, I suggest Costa Rica (our choice for our honeymoon). Heat, sun, beach, ocean and some jungle adventure tours. It was a lot of fun.
Gate crasher
This intersection is at the east end of our property.
For some reason, it’s a challenging intersection. Maybe the signs disappear every so often. I dunno. But cars frequently come straight through the intersection and end up in the ditch (note how the grass doesn’t grow here because it gets torn up so often).
However, last week, a car missed the ditch and instead ended up in our field. The problem was the gates to the field were closed at the time, so a gate, two fence posts and a few dozen feet of fence ended up in the field too.
The driver was fine. Our gate, not so much.
Dude must have been moving because the fence and posts are deep in the field.
And the posts are very, very shattered. The biggest post is actually broken in two pieces. Insane.
Even the metal hinge that’s almost an inch in diameter snapped.
Car parts and shards of the posts are scattered through the field.
Is that???
Yup. It is.
The field is far enough from the house that we didn’t actually see the accident. We found out about all of this when a police officer showed up at the house on Saturday afternoon. I got a quote from our farmer on how much it’s going to cost to fix the fence and the gate, and I called Mr. VW to discuss where we go from here. He’s supposed to drop off the money this afternoon. Fingers crossed he follows through.
Tough times on the trail
Does anyone watch the Amazing Race? Matt and I have watched every season. If you’ve not seen it, in every episode, as well as having to get from point A to point B, there are specific challenges the teams have to complete.
Sometimes the challenges are ridiculous. As in spend 14 hours doing the most physical, back-breaking, exhausting task possible.
Every so often, Matt and I find ourselves in a situation that could be an Amazing Race challenge.
That was the case about a month ago when Matt came up with the idea to clean up some of the deadfall on the east trail. I’ve mentioned before that our trails are a bit challenging. On the east trail, the challenge comes from downed trees, fallen branches and all kinds of brush.
Matt’s done this cleanup before with his Dad. I’ve never experienced this particular version of reality TV come to life. Now that I have, I don’t think I’ll be sending in my Amazing Race audition tape any time soon. Real life is quite enough.
This particular Amazing Race challenge was to
- Gather the necessary equipment–trailer, chainsaw, chainsaw oil, gas, chainsaw wrench, safety equipment, wheelbarrow
- Take the customary local conveyance (the tractor) from point A (the house) to point B (the back field)
- Fill the trailer with firewood.
- Race to the finish line (back at the house).
The key to successfully completing an Amazing Race task is smart division of labour. So Matt went to work with his chainsaw, and I had a near death experience pushed the wheelbarrow. I don’t have a picture of this because I was busy dying. Also unlike on the Amazing Race we didn’t have a camera crew following our every move.
This hill may not look like much, but it felt incredibly steep going up (and then down the other side).
The wheelbarrow was not the ideal tool for this operation, given the rocks, mud and sticks buried in the trail. Plus we were pretty far back in the woods, so the push was loooooong. And just when you approached the end, there was the catwalk over the corduroy road at the entrance to the trail.
Between the two of us we managed five loads of firewood and only a small section of trail. But, that worked out to a mostly full trailer, fulfilling our Amazing Race objective. Can’t you tell how thrilled I am?
At the end of an Amazing Race episode, competitors sprint to the finish mat where they are greeted by the host. If they’re first, they get a special prize.
In our case, I drove Wiley back to the house while Matt rode in the trailer. After stacking the wood, unhooking the trailer and putting the tractor away, we staggered to the house. As we were the only team on this leg, I think we came in first. However, our prize of an ATV and a small trailer that fits in the trail were missing.
So we’ll not be doing more clearing any time soon. I’m sure we’ll find another Amazing Race worthy challenge though. They seem to be fairly common around the farm.
Stay tuned for our next episode.
What’s your favourite reality TV show? Have you ever auditioned for a TV show? What Amazing Race-esque challenges do you get into at your house?
Home on 129 Acres 