How was your weekend? Was it cool but also weird? Because mine was. Well, at least Friday was. Did you ever, suddenly, have a day where your plans fell through so instead you were like, “Huh. Well, now what do I do?”
And then your brother is like, “Can you watch over the maple syrup while I’m away?”
That happens to you, too, right?
Oh, wait, it doesn’t?
Paul has been tapping for Maple syrup this spring. I’d like to think I encouraged this.
I’d like to think I helped, too, but, really, I didn’t help all that much. Mostly I emptied the pop bottles Paul had gathered around our two trees a few times.
Want to know something about the maple-syrup gathering process? Well, you start when the days are above freezing, but the nights are still below freezing.
I heard that, generally, this didn’t turn out to be a great spring for maple syrup…it got too warm, too fast, waking up the trees from their sleepy beds.
Anyway. Want to know something else? The ratio of boiled sap to maple syrup produced is 40:1. And that’s on a good day. Sometimes it’s 60:1.
So, if you want one gallon of maple syrup, you’ll need to gather (at least) forty gallons of sap to boil down.
As you might imagine, we don’t have a gallon of maple syrup sitting anywhere.
But! We do have a pint-glass, now only half-full, in our refridgerator! Yay for old-school arts and new school refridgerators and mid-school electric frying pans, set up in the garage. 🙂
And that’s pretty much what Friday looked like. 😀
Earlier in the spring, we had joked about quitting our day jobs and focusing solely on syrup production and setting up a stand, a la lemonaide, in our front yard for passerby (and the mailman) to buy our syrup.
But, I think it’s safe to say that we’re not going to do that anymore.
We’ll just eat it all ourselves on our own pancakes. 🙂