Sugarin'

We decided that Mother Nature is just not going to cooperate this year and tapped our trees even though we're not getting above freezing.  We had three glorious, wonderful days with temps in the forties, but I was out and about all of those days and the trees weren't tapped.  As soon as I was free?  Single digits at night.  So the trees are now tapped and we'll just wait to see if it every thaws out there.

I got the taps and hose from maplemadness.com as part of a starter kit.  I'm using a gallon water jug for collection.  I highly recommend the book Backyard Sugarin' to anyone that's considering trying this, it's a great book and the author lives in NH so he knows the area.

While I wait for spring to . . . well, spring, I'm also on the final countdown for chickens.  They ship on Monday and arrive Tuesday.  The pan was to put them in the sun room, but with the ridiculous weather, they may have to go in the dining room for a couple weeks.  I don't know if we can get the heat lamp down low enough to keep them at 95 when it's 12 degrees outside and the sunroom isn't insulated.  Joe doesn't know this yet, but as I'm blogging it, he should know shortly.  Sorry, hon!

Spring is coming

This can be more ominous than the infamous 'winter is coming' line if you're going to give food production a try for the first time.

So what have we been doing through our snowy winter?  I've been in hibernation, which is why I haven't been writing anything.  I don't like winter much.  I need sunlight in order to function.  And coffee.  Joe's been doing snow removal.  Lots and lots of snow removal.   We're on winter storm three for the past seven days, looking at about another 8 inches of snow.  He's had to snow plow a series of paths so we can get the dogs outside and let them run.  We can't even see Peyton's tail when she's running through the paths.  We call them the hamster tunnels.

Hamster tunnels

When we're not hauling the frozen nemesis away (okay, watching Joe haul the frozen nemesis away), we're planning for spring.  More accurately, I'm planning and shopping for spring.  Joe's staring at my seed lists with a look similar to a deer in the headlights.  I don't even know how many kinds of seeds I have anymore.  But I have more coming!  We've got all of the old standards (carrots, tomatoes, lettuce), some odd additions (ghost peppers, anyone?), and an entire garden's worth of herbs.  I've even got some unusual herbs coming to double as ground cover on our slopes.  I've never heard of sweet woodruff, but it's supposed to smell like vanilla, likes shade, and offers ground cover.  Good enough for me!  Our plan for this year is to stick a bunch of things in the ground and see if anything grows.  The plan of fools.

We've also ordered up our first round of chickens.  25 little balls of fluff are showing up at the beginning of March.  Six of them will be our layer flock, the other nineteen will eventually be heading to 'freezer camp'.  If this goes well, we'll keep doing it.  If it doesn't?  Well, it's only 12 weeks from arrival to eating size, so we can suffer that long.  Joe's hard at work planning out chicken tractors.  I'm just doing the shopping.  Seeing a theme?

 I'm supposed to be tapping the maple trees this week, but Mother Nature has decided I should wait a bit longer.  We're not getting above freezing during the day right now and it's freaking snowing.  Again.  I think I'll be out tapping trees this weekend, assuming I can get to them. 

On the bright side, our property looks gorgeous in the snow.

 The view from my office

  The path to the creek, which is frozen over