We have some very old and venerable trees on our land and one of them shed a major branch ("branch" hardly seems enough of a term...it is as large as a full grown tree) during a big storm. I think it was during one of last years high wind events we had. But it was time to start taking it down, which is no small task. Our little gas chain saw is not up to the job, so we went out and got a larger, electric one and started in on the project. It's going to take more than our little saws to be rid of this. Elmer has said he will come by with the tractor and pull the main part down once we've finished cutting up the rest. The good news it is at least a full cord of wood.
Note the maple sugar buckets on this tree that is still giving massive quantities of sap. Warmish, sunny days and cold nights are helping a lot this year. We've already received a half gallon of maple syrup from our trees (40 gallons of sap = one gallon maple syrup).
The sense of spring is definitely in the air. These parts are known to have snow as late as April and my seed catalogs won't even ship to me until mid-April. But the signs are there...and the maples have been tapped and are running like a spigot that hasn't been fulling turned off. The pale green shoots have been out since the last part of February, and now are showing even more fully. Flowers can't be too far away. The shot of the melted patch is showing about the size I want the garden to be this year. The patch is immediately to the right in (in the photo) of where the garden was last year, and shows the new boundary that I would like...which is about double what we did in 2010. We can't really figure out why this area is melting, though there is some run-off of qater from the hillside along the ridge. The last shot is through the tap-hole of the rain barrel in which the maple sap is being collected. There is a good three inches of sap in the bottom of the barrel and the tap, as I said, is running at a pretty good pour from the tree [And for the record, I think I wrote that at about 1:00 this afternoon...by 5:00 this evening, the 55 gallon drum was almost full!]. The weather has been pretty good...though still definitely weird...i.e. warm sunny days with cold nights.
Been very busy. The garden is in and looks to be doing well...too early to tell, of course, but the Three Sisters are in and photosynthesizing: corn is sprouting, the squash raced to leaf and at least some of the beans seem to be taking root. The rutabaga, from seed, is a mass of tiny green shoots at the moment and the tomatoes...well...the tomatoes didn't freeze and die in the last few frosts. Corn in two rows on the right in the photo, then right to left, mounds of three kinds of squash, the beans, two kinds of tomatoes, and eggplant in the far left-hand row. The far, narrow tip, left to right has more beans (Alaska), some gourd pumpkins and the rutabaga and Brussels sprouts in the middle. The onions are below those, from the left into the middle. We lost the Walla Wallas, but the others seem to be growing. We still want to find and plant some rhubarb and we have some radishes coming to put in, too.
We went to have Sunday breakfast at Lulu's on Route 40. We've driven by it a
hundred times now and every time we've said we should try it out. It looks like the farmland version of the best kind of greasy spoon...and it did not disappoint. A farmer's breakfast. We took off from there and decided to take a new route home and ended up in North Granville, where we stopped at an old house there that had a sign that said YARD SALE: GARDEN, TOOLS. And that's where I found my birthday present to myself...a handmade harvest table. The man was so happy that we planned to use it in the way it was meant to be used (I had mentioned wanting a table that I could cut vegetables and work at one end and throw a tablecloth over the other end and have dinner) that he insisted on throwing in a maple cutting board. The edges are all nicely mitered and the maple top lifts off the base. It might be nicer if the legs had been turned, but I couldn't be happier.
We got the kitchen garden in, with parsley, tarragon, oregano, two kinds of thyme (English and lemon), sage, lemon balm.
The irises are blossoming...so elegant. And the clematis is climbing
in leaps and bounds. And pretty soon we will be awash in peonies.
In addition to the table and the cutting board, we also picked up a nice oil drum barrel filled with a very nice leaf mulch (visible as the fill in the kitchen garden photo) and another, smaller barrel of pig manure and yet another barrel of cured chicken manure (mixed with wood chips). Of course now everything we read says NOT to use pig manure on the vegetables. Pat?
Anyway...now we're ready for Memorial Day weekend.And oh yeah...P.S....that bucket sitting on the cutting board on the harvest table? Potatoes.
A word about that 3/9/20 half gallon of maple syrup:
In the United States, I have learned (actually, I knew this, just not in such detail), maple syrup is divided into two major grades: Grade
A and Grade B. Grade A is further broken down into three subgrades: Light
Amber (sometimes known as Fancy), Medium Amber, and Dark
Amber. Grade B is darker than Grade A Dark Amber. The Vermont Agency of
Agriculture Food and Markets uses a similar grading system of color and taste.
The grade Vermont Fancy is similar in color and taste to U.S Grade A
Light (Fancy). [In the photo, left to right: Vermont Fancy, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber, Grade B.]
The Vermont grading system differs from the U.S. system in
maintaining a slightly higher standard of product density. Vermont maple is
boiled just a bit longer for a slightly thicker, denser product. The ratio of
the volume of sap to the yielded volume of finished syrup is higher in the
Vermont system. Maple syrup is sold by liquid volume, not weight. The Vermont
graded product has one-half percent more solid material and less water in its
composition.
It would seem that the half gallon we received, is (at best) the Light Amber, which was something of a surprise. I'm not sure which standard the locals adhere to...there's a good chance the sugar house at which the boiling is done is actually in Vermont and not New York...but I have to say I am not as fond of the Light Amber as I am of the darker, Grade B Dark Amber. Paler color = Paler flavor. Not bad...just not as mapley as I was looking forward to. The top spoon has the Grade A Amber. The bottom spoon has our current syrup, which is considerably lighter and I am calling Light Amber.
The whole grading of maple syrup is somewhat counter-intuitive. In most cases Grade A is always considered to be "better". Not so, at least among foodies, when it comes to maple syrup. Grade B Dark Amber is going to be the one you want if you are looking for that rich, maple flavor you immediately associate with syrup. It has to do with the boiling times. So I'm wondering if we couldn't "amber up" this lighted syrup by boiling in for a while ourselves?
Came home today, from a run into Glens Falls for various errands, to find a half gallon of maple syrup on our front steps!
And, for the record, we have officially gone through 75 pounds of black oil (sunflower) seed since November. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "eat like a bird" huh?
We put out three kinds of feed: black oil seed in the tube feeder, nyjer seed in a "sock," and suet with seeds in a cage.
$2 a dozen; two dozen, delivered to our front door. Yesterday, I opened the door, and the first words out of his mouth were, "The sap is gonna be runnin' today!" And I thought, when have I ever been greeted thus?
And, indeed, the sap is running. These, in the picture, are just the small buckets Tyler has set up on some of our trees. Others are tied in with long lines of blue plastic, running down hill from groups of (very) old trees (some of which have never been tapped, or at least not tapped in many years) into big blue 55 gallon drums. For the record, that gets turned into just over a gallon of maple syrup. Forty gallons of sap yields one gallon of syrup. The reason the sap is running is that we are getting good weather for it...i.e. warm(ish) days and cool nights. The sun warms the trees in the day. Not sure what role the cool nights play. But this is perfect sap weather.
I keep getting phone calls from friends wondering (worrying) about how much snow we are under. And I have to inform them that ...not so much. We really haven't had snow to speak of this year. Certainly not what this area is capable of and accustomed to. I look out my window and can see bare ground as much as I see snow. And what's more, I see the first glimmer of spring. What a glorious spring it will be, too.
I went to my first board meeting for the Pember Museum & Library. Unlike our real estate experience, where we fell in with Republicans, this seems to be a mostly big "D" Democratic group. Cake was served (it was Patty's birthday) and there was discussion of the visit with the elected officials earlier in the week, and the sad death of Rodger Hurley, the Town Supervisor who had been so helpful in making that meeting happen. Rodger was one of those rare public servants who really serves. He reminded me of the adage "It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit." (From another public servant of note: Harry S. Truman) I'm hoping, when the whole matter of the riverfront park is settled that we can get a consensus in naming it "Hurley Park." The man deserves it.
Tyler Morey, our 23-year-old neighbor, stopped by about two weeks ago, asking if he could tap our maples for sugaring. We agreed, so long as he would show one of us how he does it and knock on the door when he comes by to do it so one of us could go with him and learn about it.
So this week, he came by and we tapped the maples on our land. And I'm here to tell you, it was hard work. Not so much the setting of the lines (more on that in a moment) but the trudging up and down the hillsides where the maples are...nature's StairMaster!
Tyler has promised us a gallon of the final syrup. Even now, we've been to the local sugarhouse, Rathbun's, and we bought a half gallon of their syrup. A half gallon of grade A medium amber maple syrup! I don't think I've ever had that much maple syrup in my personal possession, ever. And now we can look forward to a whole gallon...maybe more since I've been helping out.
I've been out with Ty two days now. We've tapped eight trees on our property, six of which have never been tapped before, which Ty promises me means sweeter syrup (I can't even imagine sweeter maple syrup.) And we tapped trees surrounding our fields, on other people's land, across the street, and the stand down by the Congregational church. In all, 500 taps. He is placing 55 gallon drums under the multiple tree taps, and 15 gallon drums under single tree taps. He tells me that when the sap starts running, one of those 55 gallon drums will fill up in half a day!
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Earlier, I stopped by the Pember Library and Museum, here, to get a library card. I've been meaning to do this for some time, and my old friend, Carol, wrote me this morning, suggesting a book. She asked if we had a library and I said that we had one of some note, actually. The Pember.
It is a very lovely Victorian building, inside and out, sheathed, I'd guess, in local slate (Granville is, after all, the "colored slate capital"). The library is on the first floor and the Pember Museum is on the second story. It is a very small version of one wing of the New York City Museum of Natural History and is based on the private collection of Franklin Pember, a wealthy man from the area, circa 1860. There is also a nature preserve connected to the museum.
I got my library card, donated a subscription to Paper Crafts Magazine to the library (thereby eliminating any late charges for books I check out for a whole year!) And then I decided to take a look at the museum on the second floor. I'm so glad I did!
I got into a conversation with a woman who was sitting at a desk. I asked if Pember had collected all the specimens himself. Apparently he had. I spoke about how I had moved here recently from New York City and how the Natural History Museum there was one of my favorites. I mentioned another book that Carol had recommended to me...Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, and The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles (an incredible place, a marvelous book)...and somewhere along the way of this conversation, I mentioned that I had been a grantswriter and from the back of the exhibit room a forlorn voice rose saying "Please! I need your help!"...or something like that.
And this lovely woman comes over and introduces herself. Before I knew it I was sitting at her desk, surrounded by stuffed birds, animals and objets de curiosité. Patricia Wesneris her name and she and her husband have recently bought a house in East Greenwich (pronounced green-witch hereabouts) and we discovered we both had beehive ovens...and it was like Old Friends Week. We got along like a house afire.
She was writing a proposal to be submitted to the NYSCA (New York State Commission on the Arts) and she said there were things in the grant that she just didn't think applied. As an example, she read a portion about the requirements of her board. The want diversity, but when you are in a county and a town that is 97% white, how do you diversify? Her board is mostly women, she said...and I, half kiddingly, said "Well I can offer you a white, gay man." And she said "Yes!"
So, pending a formal invitation of course from the board, it seems I will be joining the board of the Pember Library and Museum. At least I hope so...I can't imagine a more fun way to "tap into" this community. My grantsmanship and development skills can be put to use and I think I can make a contribution.
And on top of that lovely happenstance, I think Pat may well become a friend. We both have similar houses and are both just starting in them (they have a larger house and more land). Her husband is an architect who specializes in historic restoration! How perfect is that!?
