Here we go again

After a teaser of some springlike weather and most of our snow melting Mother Nature decides that she is not quite finished with winter after all.  We are predicted to get a potentially historic blizzard with expected snowfalls of 16-24 inches and 50mph winds.  We were predicted to start with rain today and turning to snow tonight and continuing tomorrow and tomorrow night, ending on Friday morning but we missed the rain and are already getting heavy snow with schools closed, plows out and the ground is again covered.  So those hardy Minnesotans who were riding motorcycles and wearing shorts and flipflops on Monday when it was 50 will be back in their winter gear for a couple more days. 

I thought I better water the plants in the greenhouse in case I can't get there for a couple of days so I took a couple of pictures of the tomatoes while I was there.  We are still 5-6 weeks away from our last frost date for our zone 4 area so they have some time to grow yet.  The top picture are brandywine tomatoes and the bottom picture are Siberian tomatoes.  You can see the snow collecting on the plexiglass.

The sap season is winding down

The weather is warming up.  The nights are not getting below freezing and the days are too warm also.  My sap buckets have been empty since I took the last of the sap and filled the two electric roasters that I have been using to evaporate the sap outside.  The sap cooked through the night and early this morning while it was still dark I combined the contents of the two roasters into one and it cooked some more.  Late in the afternoon the sap was cooked down enough for its final boiling which is done in the house.  I just put in jars the last of the finished syrup.

I have 17 pints of amber colored syrup.  The season started for me on March 21 and lasted about two weeks.  I will leave my taps and buckets for a little while yet in case the weather changes enough to move the sap.  Next week there are some nights predicted to be 30 or high 20s with daytime 40s.

I am still a relative newbie at syrup making.  My first year I hung two buckets on taps on one tree.  The second year friends with way more experience than me brought me a little different system.  The new system has tubing attached to the taps and the tubing from several taps can drain into the same bucket which sits on the ground.  I went from two taps on one tree to twelve taps on two trees.  I only have two maples but they are massive.  There is a formula that uses the diameter of the tree to determine the number of taps that can be used.  My trees are much bigger than the largest diameter in the formula and my experienced friends helped me determine the correct number.

In year two I struggled with inaccurate thermometers.  Sap turns to syrup at 7 degrees above the boiling point of water.  So 219-220 degrees is what I was shooting for.  Too low and the syrup is thin and watery.  If it is bottled at a temperature less than 180 then it could mold.  I had three thermometers and none of them read the same.  This year I upped my game and bought a new thermometer at the place where I buy maple syrup supplies.  I also bought a hydrometer which measures the sugar concentration of the syrup.  It is an interesting process.  There is a metal cup, kind of a tube that is filled with syrup and the hydrometer, a glass instrument is placed in the cup and allowed to displace syrup until it floats, measuring the density of the fluid.  

I am pleased with my 17 pints since the season was so short, only two weeks long.  Until next year.