I have a little over a week to finish C's Children's Campside Cardi. Thankfully I am halfway through the first sleeve so I should hopefully have it done in time.
This little homestead of ours made another dream of mine (and my family) come true - harvesting our own maple syrup. Last fall the children and I identified 3 large sugar maple trees on our property (and apparently we have a lot more! I'll share more on that later on). I told my mom about them and then for Christmas she got us this tree tapping kit. About mid-March we tapped our trees. We decided to do a trial run. We didn't have all the supplies (like buckets and boiling pans) so we thought it best to start small and only collect 10 gallons of sap. That took us about one week. Once we had the full ten gallons we made a make-shift set up to boil it outside. We spent the whole day outside watching the sap boil and adding more as it got low. You can see in the photos that one of the pans got too low (the dark one) and the sap started turning into syrup too soon - we are still learning. Once it was all down to about 1/4 of what we started with, we filtered it and in I brought it inside to finish the process. I watched numerous videos on how to tell when the sap has turned into syrup, each one saying it is pretty impossible and you need a special thermometer. Even so, our syrup boiled a bit too longer and was slightly on the sugar side. We weren't discouraged though. It was our first try and besides, it tasted better than any syrup we had ever had. We ended up with a pint of syrup after all was said and done and we enjoyed it that night over waffles and pancakes. I don't think we'll ever forget that experience and are already making plans for a real sugar season next winter - hopefully with gallons upon gallons of syrup to put away for the following year.
