The Adventures of the Reese's Pieces Gang

Why should a family like ours try to raise our own meat, veggies, and sweets (honey & maple syrup)? One reason we want a self-sufficient farm is so that we can teach our children the value in working hard as an individual and as a family. Every once in a while.... they actually get it and participate with enthusiasm. This springs start of our syrup season has been a time when I have been so proud of the kids and how hard they are working WITH us. Phil and the kids have been going out to tap trees over the past few days. All of us have worked on gathering and cleaning over 70 4-5 gallon buckets to catch the sap. Today will start the harvest! I hope to use this time as an example to the kids of how fun it really is to have great attitudes and work together to get the job done!

Sorry, we don't sell our syrup, it is just for our family use. Each year we have people ask if we will sell some but we have never gathered enough for our own use let alone have extra to sell. Hopefully this year we'll get enough for the year for our family! We use about 10 gallons a year. I know that sounds like a lot but we try to avoid using sugar as much as possible, that is why we have honey bees and why we harvest maple sap. Phil and the kids have tapped over 50 trees and hope to have close to 70 tapped by the time they are done.

Today is the first day the sap should really be flowing. So I expect we will be cooking down our first batch tomorrow. I always look forward to the sugaring season and I'm always glad when it is over! :-) Thankfully it usually only lasts a few weeks, so we push though it so we can enjoy our syrup year round!

This morning we were so excited to wake up to what Laura Ingalls Wilder calls a "sugar snow" in Little House in the Big Woods. We have not gotten much sap this week because of the very warm temperatures then the very cold. On Thursday I cooked down the 18 gallons we had collected during the week. This second cook down went SOOO much faster. We finished the syrup in less than 8 hours that is a HUGE difference compared to the 18 it took us green horns for the first batch.

Today we gathered almost 25 gallons of sap! YEAH!! We will gather again tomorrow then on Monday another home school family is coming over to learn about the syruping process. They are a family from our church who has 4 girls and 1 boy. Their children's ages match up almost perfectly with our kids, and Eliza loves having them over since the girl count is almost equal to the boys when they are here! :-)