Pre-Garden Update

In February, I ordered seeds for this year's garden.  Later that month, I sewed the peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, watermelon, marigolds, asparagus and rhubarb indoors.  With the exception of one variety of peppers, (the Peruvian ones, wouldn't you know, because DD2 & I were so excited to get those seeds), they all sprouted and are growing well.

Once all the seedlings in the trays had unfurled their first sets of leaves, and when DD1's bridal shower was over, I erected my little 'greenhouse' (the acquisition of which I blogged about here several years ago) and transferred the trays into that. For over a month now,  it has held a prominent spot in my living room, right in front of the big sliding door that faces east, and also in the path of one of the two south facing windows of that room.

Inside, everything is warm and humid and green.  It's so nice to see green stuff, as outdoors most everything is still brown and yellow from the winter.  The grass in the yard had barely started to grow late last week when we got hit with a really nasty cold and wet spell.  Saturday was rain, Sunday was freezing rain and sleet, Monday was snow, and even today has been little spits of snow now and then with a cold, cold wind.

It's so nice to look in the greenhouse and see green.  Like the ferny asparagus fronds. And the tomato plants with their strong thick stems and 3-4 sets of leaves all ready.

baby asparagus

August's fresh tomatoes

Since it's too cold in the garden still to plant anything, even the peas or lettuces, I've been prepping what I can. On Friday, I received my one and only order of seed potatoes for this year.  I'm adding Superior (bought from The Maine Potato Lady) to the many varieties I all ready grow.

Meanwhile, down in the cellar, I have quite a few potatoes left from last year's harvest.  Each crate or basket is a different variety, except for two or three that I had a bumper crop of and needed more than one storage container for.

the left half

the right half

Most of them are starting to chit (grow sprouts), and so I took my handy little kitchen scale to the cellar, where I put it to use measuring out 2 pounds of this kind for seed, or three or five pounds of that kind for seed, depending on what amount I want to harvest of each variety.  In general, average yield is roughly 10 pounds for every one pound of seed potatoes planted.  So, for instance, the really nice big oblong ones that we use for baked potatoes or slicing into french fries, I want to grow more of than I do the fingerling ones which are good for roasted potatoes and potato salads, but that we don't eat quite as much of.  And the round red ones that make the really creamy mashed potatoes, I want to plant lots of those too.  Thanksgiving dinner alone at this little place here can easily use up five pounds of red potatoes for mashed potatoes.

purple potatoes chitting

Once measured out, each variety went into it's own box on the shelf, to await warmer weather (and warmer soil!) out in the garden.  All together, I have roughly 27 pounds of seed potatoes set aside.  

What's left in the baskets and crates we will continue to eat until they get too old and withered to be palatable.  That typically occurs in late April or early May, depending on how quickly the cellar warms up.  Even though many of the potatoes have little sprouts, the sprouts can easily be knocked off and the potato cooked as normal.  It doesn't affect the taste or edibility of the potato any.

Boots, A Rope, and Some Puddles

A little boy.  A pair of rubber boots.  A piece of rope.  Lots of puddles.  Add some imagination and what do you get?

An hour or more of 'fishing'!

patiently waiting for a bite

Apparently some 'big ones' live in the puddles of my driveway.  At least, according to Toad they do. Every 'fish' he caught was a 'big one'.

Done!

Done tapping trees for the year, that is.  I went ahead and pulled taps today.  Its been about six weeks since I put them in; the buds are swelling, the sap is getting a yellowish tint, not to mention that today's high temperature is well over sixty degrees.  It's time to be done. 

fat buds on the maple trees

This has been a spectacular season for maple syrup at this little place here.  I have nearly three gallons of finished syrup, and should net about a half gallon more from the sap I have yet to boil (last week was really cold, and there was no sap all week, followed by a huge rush starting this past weekend). By my estimate I have boiled off roughly 115 gallons of sap and am in the process of finishing another 25 gallons .  That means I've collected 140 gallons of sap this season. From just 10 taps! 

What has been interesting to me is how the production of each maple tree varied from its neighbors.  Of that 140 gallons, a huge portion, maybe almost half, came out of just two trees.  These trees, with just one tap each, practically gushed sap on the hard running days, and maintained a steady drip on other days.  Now other trees barely trickled anything, adding up to perhaps a half-gallon on a 'really heavy' day, and having more than a few days where their taps were completely dry. One tree has been dry as a bone all this week while the others have been running well. What was even more interesting was that the over-achiever trees were not next to each other, and were often within anywhere from 4-10 feet of trees that were stingy.

Hmm.  A science mystery for me to ponder.  What made the capillary uptake of these heavy sap producers so much different from their neighbors?  Could  they, in some way, have been 'stealing' moisture from the root systems of the trees closest to them, hogging the groundwater and minerals, as it were? Or was it just the individual nature of each tree to produce sap at different rates, the way people are individuals with varying metabolic rates? Were they just super trees?

just pop the spile out with a little pressure from the hammer

the hole will heal over, 

just like the one from a few years ago above and to the right of it

Whatever the reason for those two extraordinary trees, the sap run is finished, and I have plenty of syrup stocked for our needs in the coming year, plus extra in case next year's sap season isn't a favorable one.

I didn't get any of the light Grade A syrup this year, but I did get quite a bit that is a nice shade of amber. 

Now all I need to do is finish boiling off the last few buckets of sap, wash all the buckets and spiles to get them ready for storage, and take the milk jugs in to the local recycling collection point. It's time to move on to gardening season at this little place here.

Recurring Dreams

For a while now, actually several years, I've been having weird dreams roughly once every month or two that, when I look at them as a group, all have the same or very similar theme.  They aren't happy dreams, which in itself is troubling (who likes to have disturbing dreams?  Especially regularly.)  I typically wake up from dreams like this feeling stressed, emotionally spent and unsettled for many hours afterward.

I don't get into a whole lot of superstitious stuff, or delve much into Tao, energy, aura, etc kinds of things.  However, I do believe our dreams are somewhat indicative of what our subconscious mind is concerned with.  So, to have recurring dreams on a theme is causing me to take a look at my life in general.

According to my dreams, I seem to be feeling:

--confined by family (typically in any one dream there are many members of my immediate or extended family overwhelming me with either their presence or their demands/needed care)

--hunted??? (often a feeling of being followed or having to stay one step ahead of someone trying to get to me)

--deserted by my husband (he often is in the beginning of one of these dreams, but somehow disappears leaving me to fend for myself or otherwise get myself out of a situation I don't want to be in.)

--dropped into situations without my consent (hosting large gatherings where people just start showing up unexpectedly, moving to/buying a new house I had never seen or even known we were about to move, having to share my house with one of DH's sisters and her husband and offspring because they couldn't afford their own home any longer, etc)

--having to fix things I know very little about while people around me pass by, or make demands on my time and attention, without offering me any assistance in my very vital and on a deadline repair efforts


I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of this is wrapped up in DH's ongoing long work hours and demands of his job that take him mentally away even when he is physically with me.  Also the revolving door we seem to have with our kids moving out, moving back in, moving out, maybe moving back in again for a while, or another kid moving back in simultaneously or immediately after one of their siblings moves out. . . or having the care and raising of the grandkids unexpectedly for weeks/a month+ at a time.  Add to that the fact that these moving back ins are more like having roommates than being one nuclear family again with the parents determining the rules, division of labor, what goes where, and schedule.  (I've never had a roommate--I went from my parents' house to having my own house and power, so this is really difficult for me.)  Plus the fact that we are still financially supporting several of our offspring in one way or another. . . cell phones, car insurance (and repairs), money towards unexpected expenses while still in college. 

And most of all my increasing need for my own space/empty nest/life.  I know that the longer this goes on, the more my children get into their twenties and seem to be less self- and financially sufficient than I was at the same age, the more often these dreams come.  I wonder if this is the way the rest of my life is going to go; if they will never actually grow up and leave me to my own pursuits (and monetary plans).  Because if so, honestly, this isn't what I want.  It isn't the way I raised them; it isn't the the plans DH and I had for the second half of our lives.

That's just our own descendants.  I can't even start on our own brothers and sisters and how their life choices affect us now and again. . .

Yarn Along, April. What?

How did it get to be time for another Yarn Along all ready?  March was such a long month (compared to February), but suddenly I'm finding myself staring at the calendar and realizing it's the first Wednesday in April!  Time to join Ginny and see what sorts of yarn-y goodness everyone is up to, as well as check out some possible reads to add to the book list.

As for me, I finished the first (left) of my Deflect socks and am roughly half-way through the leg portion of the second (right) sock. I have to say, doing a cable pattern on a portion of the heel stitches certainly has stretched my comfort zone. Not impossible, but definitely not the I've-done-this-so-many-times-I-can-do-a-heel-flap-on-autopilot heel that I'm used to. I may have had to unknit a few rows. And maybe even more than once before I got to the heel turn.

Reading wise, I've got a couple of things going on right now.  There's the current issue of Taproot magazine that arrived in my mailbox last week.  Also thumbing through A Year of Pies, and reading slowly essay by essay through A Glorious Freedom, both of which I got through my local library.

But what's gotten most of my attention in the last few days is a book I didn't even know existed until maybe two weeks ago: Lessons With Margot.  It is book number five, I guess, of The Dressage Chronicles series.  Apparently after finishing the series with book four, the author decided to kind of do a postscript specifically of technical horse training types of stuff.  I indulged myself and ordered it off of Amazon literally five minutes after discovering that this book existed. Written in the first person and being sort of a memoir of the author's own training and dressage riding experiences, this book is just as engaging as the fiction novels in The Dressage Chronicles series, and I just love reading it.

It Began With Twenty Pounds of Alfredo Noodles

Twenty pounds.  Twenty freaking pounds!  Of 1.5" long noodles.  In plastic bags that had been closed with those sticky tie things and a sticker that said "repack date 12/09/2017".  Short, pre-broken into the size that (I think, because I rarely buy those things) the noodles in the packages of seasoned noodle side dishes come in. With some green--I assume spinach?--noodles randomly mixed throughout the normal colored noodles.

You see, DH was up north last weekend, assisting in the cutting down of a very old, very tall, very leaning over a building oak tree at his mother's place.  And when he left to come home, she sent home a box--a grocery store banana box--of 'stuff I ordered through the food bank'.  Being such a large box, he threw it in the truck without looking at it, assuming it held a variety of edible items.

*For reasons DH and I haven't been able to figure out, and have never found offered around us no matter how we search, up where Mother-in-Law lives, she apparently can order items from the local food bank.  The offerings vary widely month to month, and are typically close dated, but are very very cheap.  Like the time she got a case of Betty Crocker cookie mixes for something like $3.  Now, sometimes she actually gets stuff we are willing to eat and appreciate her generosity in purchasing and sharing with us (she rarely eats any of it herself, but buys it with the intent to give it to her kids and grandkids). But more often than not, its not something we really use often--or at all, like the gallon jug of buffalo wing sauce. . .the institutional sized cans of fruit cocktail. . . the Suddenly Salad packets. . . we did use the restaurant portioned packages of 2 saltines per package--all 200 some--but it was annoying to unwrap enough to put into a soup bowl, not to mention having all those stupid plastic wrappers to throw away. . .*

Anyway, to continue my story here, DS2 and Surprise had also gone up north, meeting DH at a spot along the way that was equidistant from both our houses and riding together the remaining distance to Mother-in-Law's.  When they split up again on the way home, DS2 grabbed four bags of the Alfredo noodles from the opening in the top of the box to take home for him and Surprise to eat.  Upon his arrival at this little place here, DH plopped the box on the island in my kitchen, and said "Mom sent some noodles and stuff".

Oh great.  "Mom sent" is a phrase that anymore sends chills down my spine.  She means well, she really does, but what she sends typically ends up being my problem to store, use up, or find a means of disposing of (ironically, the stuff she buys at such a bargain from her food bank is not acceptable for donation at any food bank I've talked to down here; typically because of the expiration date or method of packaging.)

Trying to mask the heavy sigh that involuntarily escaped my body, I started pulling baggies of noodles out of the box.  And kept pulling baggies of noodles out of the box.  All that was in the box was baggies of noodles.  One pound of noodles in each bag, twenty bags in all.  Of little flippin' noodles!  What in the h@*! am I going to do with all these stupid short noodles?  It's not like we go through a ton of pasta now that it's usually just DH and I eating at home.  And this size and shape of noodle isn't exactly a commonly called for ingredient in recipes. 

Twenty pounds!  How long is it going to take me to use up 20 pounds of these things?  And where am I going to store them?  What bug-proof, mouse-proof container am I going to store them in for the eons (noodles do stay good a number of years) it is going to take to eat them up.  Because DS2 was only willing to take 4 bags, and that was before I counted them.  DS1 politely but firmly declined when I offered to send some home with him (I've been taking the grandkids to school this week, as well as having Toad after school on the mornings he has preschool as well as all day on the days he doesn't have preschool).  It would cost too much to mail some to DD2 at college, plus her semester ends in a little over a month.  And DD1 currently lives here, so I can't foist any off on her.  And, guess what, my local food bank isn't interested in them, thank you!

So, my house is now cluttered with twenty pounds of noodles I have little use for.  That was just the beginning of this week which has increasingly tried to bury me.  Noodles.  Then there was the phone call "Hey, our babysitter is gone on vacation this week; can you take the kids to school in the mornings, pick up Toad from preschool, and keep him with you when he's not in school?".  So I've had extra duties there as well as rearranging my schedule at work to line up with having the grandkids daily all week.  I have given up any hope of riding my horse until April.

Add to that taking DD1 and her wedding gown to a tailor to have the bustle put in her wedding dress (the wedding is seven weeks from this weekend!!).  Because she is teaching full time, the only times she is available for appointments is four o'clock in the afternoon or later.  Wednesday was our appointment with the tailor, and since I needed gas for the suburban, and according to Gas Buddy it was nearly a full 30 cents a gallon cheaper in the town the tailor is located than it is near me, I said "hey, let's just take my suburban," planning to fill it up over by the tailor (because a 27 gallon tank fill at 30 cents less per gallon adds up to a handful of cash saved).  I didn't count on, roughly 1/4 mile before the tailor, getting a puncture in one of my tires that had me pulling into the parking lot with a rapidly (and loudly) deflating tire.  Add one phone call to the insurance company for roadside assistance to my all ready packed schedule.  Then wait for their service truck to come and help me put on the spare (which was pretty much rusted into it's little holding bracket under the suburban. . . )

Oh!  And I almost forgot about getting a few propane tanks refilled so I can keep boiling sap (because it ran really good over the weekend and by Monday night I had 45 gallons of sap piled up in my garage) and apparently one tank got overfilled somehow and had liquid propane getting in the line, which nearly completely froze the regulator and at one point I had two foot high flames shooting out around my boil pot whenever the gas line sputtered.

I am the god of hellfire. . .

I think I need a vacation.  No noodles.  No kids. No driving. No sap boiling.  Alone.  Somewhere warm and sunny.  With a book, or knitting, or hey, what about time to actually ride my horse?!?

Maple Candy

This year's syrup harvest is going well.  In just a week of boiling, I netted a little over a gallon of finished syrup.  (Which means I boiled roughly 40 gallons of sap that week . .)  I'd say that gallon of syrup should easily last us for the coming year.  But, just in case, and because the weather continues to hold off the maple buds from swelling too much, I am continuing to collect sap, and boil it down.  You never know when a little syrup stockpile will come in handy; because of crazy weather I didn't tap trees at all in 2016 or 2017.  So its nice to have extra syrup on hand and I'll keep collecting sap until the buds on the trees get too developed.

Yesterday I boiled for more than twelve hours, with cold sap being added to the pot at regular intervals.  My goal this weekend is to just keep adding and boiling, and see how many gallons of sap I can get through.  Around 5:00 this evening I'll stop adding sap and just boil off what is in the pot at that point.  So far this weekend, I've boiled more than 15 gallons of sap.  I'm thinking that even with not boiling anything between bedtime Saturday and roughly 1:30  this afternoon (Palm Sunday church service with a potluck lunch after took up all morning and part of the early afternoon) I most likely will have boiled enough sap to net about 1/2 gallon more syrup.

From the batch that I finished off on Thursday afternoon, I had roughly a cup of syrup more than would fit into my pint jars--I do not pour partial jars and then top off with the next batch, although I suppose you could if you wanted to.  So I poured it into a dish and set it aside, planning an experiment of sorts.  You see, I've been toying with the idea of making those little maple leaf candies that are so ungodly expensive to buy.  I understand why they are so expensive, as syrup is so time consuming to produce.  But that doesn't mean I'm going to shell out money to buy them.  No, I want to take my virtually free (not counting my labor) syrup and make them myself.  I even bought a mold to do so last time I went to Shipshewana (here).

So, yesterday afternoon, while minding the boiling pot (ie. staying home and checking it about every 15 minutes), I decided I was going to do it.  Make candy, that is.

It is ridiculously easy, although I can see that like many things, it will take practice to perfect the technique.  Mine came out totally edible, if not exactly aesthetically pleasing.

Basically, you pour your syrup into a pot that looks way deeper than necessary--it will bubble up quite a bit during heating (note brown marks on pot in photo below).  Then, with the aide of a candy thermometer, you heat that syrup to 240 degrees.  This actually doesn't take very long at all, so don't walk away!

Once the syrup reaches 240, remove the pot from the burner (and shut the burner off!) and let it sit undisturbed (don't even take out the candy thermometer) for 3 minutes.

Then, using a wooden spoon, stir that sucker the hot syrup vigorously until it thickens and loses it's gloss. This doesn't take more than a few minutes.

Immediately (like literally as fast as you can and I still wasn't fast enough), pour the thickened syrup into the molds and shave off any excess that sticks up above the surface of the mold. Let cool (I think it took 10-15 minutes?) and then turn the mold over and gently tap to dislodge the candies.

leaves, blobs, whatever

I will definitely make more of these.  After all, I'm a perfectionist.  I need to practice, practice, practice until I can make them beautiful as well as edible. I'm pretty sure I can whip (stir) the syrup just a hair less before putting it into the molds next time.  The first couple candies came out the most uniform, and as the whipped syrup got cooler, it got harder to spoon off into the mold. Hence not exactly looking like a maple leaf.  So, next time I  will leave it a little runnier and a little hotter when I mold it.

And the awesome thing I learned about this, is that you can easily make maple sugar this exact way: just pour it out into a sheet (like on a cookie sheet) rather than into molds, and let it cool.  Then pulse it in the blender to break it up.

Mmmmm!