Swimming in a sea of sap

We are inundated with maple sap! Ten gallons of sap a day for 8 days equals 2 gallons of syrup. The weather is cooperating. Frosty nights and warm days. This amount of sap at one time is a a first for us. This is our third year sugaring and we've never had to handle this much sap at once. We hope it keeps flowing for a few more days so we can beat our prior syrup savings of 2 gallons.
And when we are not feed flames and straining the days collections we sit and work on a new rug ...in the sun! Look at those hard working farm lady hands....:)

Questioning a life

Saturday we drive down to Portland to take the teen to a metalsmithing class he is taking at the Maine College of Art. We started going down last fall when he was taking a photography class. It has been a nice change of pace. We drive down early Saturday morning, drop the teen off at his class and then have several hours to wander around town. Sometimes I connect with old friends, sometimes Mark and Evan go on their own adventure while I go on my own adventures; usually involving thrift stores and yarn shops. Sometimes we pick up some things that are not so easy to get in our area like really nice, affordable art supplies at the ART MART. But mostly we spend time in many of my old haunts.

Before I got back to the land, I was a city girl. I was raised in the city, I worked in Cambridge, Ma, I moved to Portland in 1989. I never touched a chicken growing up, goats and sheep were critters I knew only from county fairs. And yet, here I am wakened by the sound of baa-ing sheep, saving carrot peelings for my chickens, marking the retreat of snow from the soil.

I wouldn't say that I just woke up one day and decided that this was the life I wanted to live. It was a matter of circumstances presenting themselves and providing lessons for me. I've shared before that I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when I was 29. At the time I had to really think about what was most important to me as I realized that my health was not letting me live the fast paced life of a single mother, working a full time job and taking classes at the local university. As a result, life slowed down out of necessity and allowed time to explore what my body would allow me to do and in the process I discovered gardening, canning and knitting.

My lessons in self sufficiency were taught out of necessity. Portland has vibrant community gardens. I learned so much in my tiny little 5 by 15 plot. I grew enough veggies during the summer to never need to buy veggies through the summer. One summer, Tristan and I were really poor as my health impacted my ability to work at my fast paced hospital job. This was the summer that I realized that I could put a few extra quarts of green beans in the fridge. Friends and I gathered around a second -hand water bath canner to make strawberry jam. I shredded zucchini for the freezer. I canned tomatoes. It wasn't much food but some weeks that winter, when it was tough to get all the money I may have needed for the groceries, those few veggies filled the soup pot. I learned to knit and made Tristan's hats and mittens with yarn I found cheap at the Good Will. I patched the knees of his pants. I made very good use of my library card and read about simple living, Helen and Scot Nearing. Eventually, I moved north from Portland, met the man of my dreams and he shared the same dream of living a country life.

Here we are on our two acres, with our 7 sheep, one goat, 5 chickens and half acre garden. We heat with wood and each year that we live this life we find more we can do for ourselves. The recent upheaval in our lives has tested us. For me, holding the fort down during the week, I often wonder if this is a life one person could do on their own. For hubby who has to be away from his family and is living a town life right now, he muses on what it would be like for his whole family to be under one roof in town. For all of us who visit Portland, the lure of city life is exciting; there is so much music, art and progressive thinking. At this time, when we will be making some sort of change this coming year, it is easy to think that downscaling, giving up some of our self-sufficiency for the ease of a town life, would be a path we could take. It is one choice we could make.

But when it comes right down to it, I love this life. I may not like the struggles we have been through over the last year. It would be very easy to take the easy way out. But I love this life. I love living a life that follows the rhythm of the seasons. I love the quiet nights and star lit skies that I couldn't find in the city. I love those wooly faces that come up to me for a little grain from my hand. I love watching my boys , even though they are 13 years apart, get wild outside on a muddy spring day. I love the sense of satisfaction that comes from doing for myself, that full pantry in the fall, that sweater knit with love, those repurposed objects that saved us money.

I love this life so any doubts about what choices we may have made fall away....

Back to the sugaring....

Challenge Updates. IDC, Real Food and One small Change

What a beautiful weekend we had! The weather was warm and sunny. The nights were cool and clear. The sap is really running. We collected 20 gallons this weekend and spent most of the weekend boiling it all down, alas we have no finish product yet. Mostly, because in the three years we've been sugaring we have never had this much sap at once to process..and it is still flowing...

So, I've been pondering what I could do in the Real Food Challenge that would move us closer to a real food diet. We eat a lot of local food, we cook from scratch, we put up a lot of food but one thing we could do is remove refined sugar from our diet. In my cupboard is a gallon of black strap molasses, 5# pounds of raw local honey, and soon, hopefully, at least 2 or 3 gallons of maple syrup and...5 pounds of white sugar and some store bought brown sugar. White sugar is mostly from genetically modified sugar beets. It is far from locally sourced ( well neither is the molasses but I need the extra iron it provides) and really it doesn't provide any extra dietary benefits as the other sweeteners do. Both Mark and I come from families with type 2 diabetes. Although we eat a good diet and exercise and do not have any weight issues, we could be kinder to our pancreases.

Two other things I would like to learn to do this month is lact0-fermentation. I am going to use this book. I also would like to make a sourdough starter. I have tried a couple times and the results have been sad.

As for good food, I made a yummy dinner last night. Onion tart with goat cheese. I used the recipe in this book that I received for Christmas. I also roasted some root veggies, sauteed some cabbage and apples with ginger and made homemade french bread. We had a glass of local wine with dinner. We shared the meal around an oil lamp. It is something Mark and I used to do when we first were coupled and fell out of the habit. But I just thought that we should take one meal a weekend and make special .

Okay, so my One Small Change for the month of March was mending. This was tackled on Saturday when I darned 3 pairs of socks while sitting outside. I feel sock rich now and Mark is now wearing the first pair of socks I made for him again.

Finally, the Independence Days Challenge got off to a great start this past week and I am really looking forward to this challenge this year.

Plant Something: I bought some growing medium for starting some seeds this week so the intention is there, the action shall follow...

Harvest Something: 30 gallons maple sap. The snow has melted off the parsnips and jerusalem artichokes but the ground is still frozen so soon we will have spring roots!

Preserve Something: We are boiling the sap down but we don't have syrup yet. 1 quart of vanilla extract started.

Waste not/Managed Reserves: Darned those socks! Started to muck out the sheep and put it in the compost bins. Tidied pantry. started 2 quarts of apple cider vinegar from some old apples.

Want not: We got our bulk food order this past week. So we have a full stock of staples now.

Build community food systems: Local eggs, local meat, local apples, local goat cheese, MOO milk!

Eat the food: I made American chop-suey from the meat, Frittata from the eggs and the goat cheese went on the onion tart.

Well, phew, it seems like a lot, but all the challenges work well together

In this moment...

I sit, my head bent down over a hole-some sock. I hear the humming of my wee one as he empties mud from one mud hole to another, the swish of his snow pants telling me where he is moving. I hear the breeze swim through the trees, the sound of Mark chopping wood for the boiling sap. I look up and see clothes dancing on the line, rejoicing in the sun. I look forward to the smell of fresh air that lingers in the fibers. I look down and follow my darning needle as it weaves in and out and I think...this is the perfect simple moment....

Okay, Really..another Challenge?..Oh okay...

Just a quick posting here to share this challenge.

We don't eat processed foods but, given that our food stores are low, it would be easy to fall back into some bad habits. This seems like a great challenge for me because it takes much of what we are doing here and delves deeper. And given the food fatigue that settles in this time of year before the new greens are on our plate, parsnips are freed from their winter mulch and I am daydreaming of new peas while I play in the soil, this challenge can stir things up;)

Independence Days Challenge, Year Three!

I began this blog a couple of years ago as a way to document my progress in this very smart woman's challenge. At the time, I had just become aware of peak oil and I was entering my first full growing season on our homestead. The price of oil had reached 147.00 a barrel. Gasoline was 4.50 a gallon. Food prices were inflating in response to the rising costs of production and delivery. As the cook and chief gardener, I felt a compelling drive to be able to feed my family simply but well. The implications of our food system's dependence of oil; from production to delivery, are great. To me, it seemed imperative that in order to ride out the disruptions that, individually, we would all have to become more self-sufficient. Since then, the economy has taken a turn for the much worse and as I have shared, our family has some potential challenges in our near future. ( Still no word yet).

At this time, there is a nearly empty freezer in the workshop that was filled to the brim with veggies we put up last summer. The pantry filled with all that home canned food is showing bare spots. Seed catalogs grace many bare surfaces in our home. The days grow longer and the snow retreats.

So it is time to begin the Independence Days Challenge. For my family it has never been as important to do this challenge as it now. Last fall, I felt a great sense of accomplishment as I added more to the list of Preserving Sanity along the side bar. I embraced the challenge of finding room for one more batch of pickled carrots in the very crowded pantry. Last year was a hard growing season in the north east. We had a month and a half of rain from June to July. Tomatoes and potatoes were blighted. The cool weather stunted the growth of the winter squash we depend on as a staple food. Much of what we would grow and put up ourselves was supplemented with bulk purchases from local farmers and u-pick farms. But still, although it seemed plentiful we are back to buying produce at the store.

So my goal for the coming year is to expand the range of foods that we put up and increase quantities enough so that we will have enough to get us to April, not just March. I would like to increase the amount of food that we get from foraging. Life is still in flux, so my garden this year will be heavy on those crops that will get us to August or just after; so, many greens, lots of spinach, carrots, beets, onions, broccoli, early potatoes. If we decided that we will be staying here, which we should know by May, then we we will expand. If we find that we will be moving, our new home has a cold room that I will use for storage of winter squash, carrots, cabbages, potatoes. The property has a dozen fruit trees, a mix of apple and pear. I will also have time to plant a winter garden with carrots, greens.

Ultimately, for me, it is all about becoming as self-sufficient as possible. This does not necessarily mean that my little patch of earth has to provide for all my needs. But it does mean that by doing what I can for myself, building relationships with farmers, employing barter, using second-hand whenever possible and fixing and mending to prolong the life of what we have; I will be less dependent on money to meet all of our needs and we will stretch what dollars we have for those things we can't get otherwise.

I'll post my updates on Mondays and look forward to sharing our work with you.

One Small Change, February wrap up, March Aspiration

Today is March first. Time to ponder my One Small Change for March and last month's small change.

For February, my one small change was to have my oven multi-task in order to be more efficient with the liquid propane that it uses. I was able to achieve this by employing several tactics. First and foremost I tried to plan better. We bake our own bread which means that the oven is at a temp of 350 degrees for one hour, two or three times a week. On bread baking day, I would plan to bake something else in the oven while the bread was baking. Sometimes it was twice baked potatoes that needed to be baked for the first time. Other times, I would whip up a quick bread while the yeast bread was on it's second rise so that all the breads would be in the oven at the same time. I would also arrange the timing of the bread going into the oven if there was something that was going to be baked or roasted with dinner. I also resorted to batch baking; taking some of the recipes I use often and doubling them. I tried to increase the numbers of loaves of bread I would bake so that I would decrease the amount of times I turned on the oven on during the week. I also used the top of our woodstove more often to keep tea water always warm and at the ready, to slow cook beans during the day, to steam squash for soups and breads.

All in all, I think it went pretty well. I considered this month a great success when yesterday Mark was in the kitchen preparing his feast for St. Davids day. He had a batch of beer cooking on the woodstove, a pot of cawl cennin cooking on the wood stove and a batch of cyrmu cakes baking on the electric griddle. In about another month and a half we will not be using the woodstove so much. But we have an old cookstove that we use for sapping, summer canning and summer baking that we will put back into service.

For the month of March my one small change is to embrace the notion of reducing (one of the three R's) by tackling a mental block I have to the notion of mending.

Starting with these socks. They have been haunting me all winter. It is just so much fun to cast on for a new pair of socks. But these old wooly friends have served me well and still have a lot of life left in them, as well as a few well worn heels. So I will mend these beauties and wear them in my work boots this spring. This will also save the life of my newer socks.

I also have a basket full of mending. Little tears, seams that need reinforcing, work pants that just need one more patch. So I will diligently sit down at least once a week and whittle away at the pile.

By mending the clothing and socks I am giving my garments longer life and preserving some clothing from being relegated to the work clothes drawer. I am not adding to landfills with old clothing. I am not buying more clothes when the ones I have are just fine; even if they have more character than the ones found on the rack at the Goodwill.

So what is your change this month?