One of the most magical-seeming things that we do to eat locally is to make our own maple syrup and sugar. Maple sap flow has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, we tapped a tree or two a few times for the fun of it, but what we do now is a more serious effort.

Sap starts running in maple trees (most famously, sugar maples) when the daytime temperatures start to get above freezing, and the nighttime temperatures still dip below freezing. This is the time to drill a small hole in the trunk of a maple, tap a “spile” into it, and hang a bucket to catch what drips from the spile. In the photo, you can see the spile conducting the sap flow into a bucket hanging below it. This is a classic setup, but in a pinch we’ve also used plastic plumbing parts, tubing, and glass bottles for collection. Something needs to conduct the sap away from the drilled hole, or it just runs down the treetrunk. Spiles used to be carved from wood, too. When I was a kid, my absolute favorite story was the chapters in “Little House in the Big Woods” by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which describe making maple syrup and sugar and sugaring off.

The watery sap is collected by the gallon, usually, then boiled down to get a higher concentration of sugar. Some seasons are poor, if the weather warms too quickly, and trees don’t have the temperatures needed to keep sap flow going. Some seasons are really good, with weeks of the right temperature range. Here’s a New York Times article about the effect of global warming on maple trees and sap production in New England. Yet another delicate balance that may disappear from the world of our descendants?

Last week we had a moderate sap run and made a few pints of syrup, during the warm spell we had. Now it’s cold again and the sap is not running, but soon it will be in full swing…. :)

The seed order from Fedco arrived. I spread the neat little packets out all over the floor to check them out. The cat was very interested, then finally fell asleep carefully cuddled up next to the packets. Seems she likes Fedco as much as we do! Seed starting time is so exciting. It makes spring seem so much closer.

Last fall I created some low tunnel hoophouses over some vegetables to extend the season. They are very pieced-together: rib supports of springy high-tensile wire someone didn’t want, some low fencing sections, and wire cages, and covered by leftover strips of plastic given away by a real hoophouse builder. They covered beds of celery, carrots, kale, cabbage stalks, lettuce, kholrabi, and swiss chard. And a few radiccio that hadn’t done anything by the time it froze.

The edges of the plastic are held to the ground by stray bricks, rocks, and a few terracotta pots. Money spent on my creation: $0. The system was great in November, and then froze solid and immediately was buried under snow for the duration of December and January. I felt sheepish and ridiculous every time I looked at the things all winter, but this week we got a big thaw, the snow disappeared, and I was able to slog through mud to peel back the plastic. And I got a nice surprise.

Things are growing under there! Amidst lots of dead stems and leaves, there are new greens ready for salad. The mizuna did the best. It was too peppery to eat much of by the end of the summer, but the frilly new growth is tender and mild. Chard and kale are coming back too. The new little leaves stand in for lettuce.

So we had a great midwinter salad, and the hoophouses earned their keep, haphazard as they are. I even threw in a few new seeds of cornsalad and spinach for hopes of an early start. Perhaps we can upgrade our cobbled mini-greenhouses this year, but for now….. they worked!

I guess it’s part of my personality to go through a hard time without saying much, and only after, when there is some relief, when the pressure is off, to look back and realize - okay, that was hard! Sheesh, that kind of sucked!

I know we’ve got more than a month of potential winter weather to go, but here, it feels like we’ve turned the corner. The daylight has returned, the harshness of the weather has broken. The hens are increasing their egg production, and I have the first pots of seeds started on the windowsill next to the woodstove. This morning, I scrutinized them and discovered seedlings! Tiny leeks are just poking out of their seeds, barely there, but THERE!

We didn’t post much in December and January.

(the point of this picture is that there has been nothing to photograph, except snow...)

In December, two cars (for all practical purposes) bit the dust, and we scrambled in winter weather to find a replacement we could afford, scraping funds together on short notice. The snowploughs took out the mailbox, and there’s been no way to get another post into the ground through the snow and solid freeze. In January, in the coldest of the cold, a waterpipe and the kitchen septic froze. We learned the hard way exactly where in the crawlspace the washing machine drain connects to the septic system, after flooding the kitchen heartily for the second time when we tried to do laundry. The rest of the month was a dance of orchestrating heat in the house, balancing the need to conserve with the need to keep pipes unfrozen; a ballet of opening and closing doors, cutting, loading, stacking firewood, and debating ways to load the woodstove for longest and most efficient burning, covering windows in the dark and opening them to the sun. It’s been a hard winter for so many people…. we’ve heard of barns collapsing under the snow; folks with high hopes for hoophouse greenhouses lost them to the snow and cold. We are thankful January has passed.

So, we’re mighty glad to feel the change in the weather! Seed starting time and maple sap gathering are right around the corner!