Hauling Maple Sap

With warmer temperatures in the forecast, the maple trees should soon start filling buckets with their sap. I am certainly hopeful  that happens so I thought I should prepare a bit for those gallons and gallons of sap. Many of the trees we tap are not close to any trail we can use to haul the sap on with mechanical means. Once some of the snow melts we might be able to use Ann's pony to haul some of it but there will still be areas where it has to be carried by hand. Five gallons of sap weights about 40 pounds. After a few dozen trips your arms begin to complain. All this lead to my recent project as pictured here, a carrying yoke. I tried it out here with six gallon buckets full of water so I had roughly 100 pounds on. I need to shorten the ropes so that I can grasp the bucket handle and thus divide the load between my shoulders and my arms.

I started out by splitting a aspen log in half with the chain saw. As you will see in the following pictures, I did almost all the cutting and carving with a chainsaw. Chisels, rasps, and knives were used to smooth every thing out. I did not want to spend a lot of time on this so some of the work was left a bit crude.If this turns out to be something I use a lot I will finish it off a little nicer! Some of the felt I made last week found a home as padding  on this.

I determined the overall length by holding a bucket in each hand and then measuring the distance between their centers. To that I add a couple inches for insurance, I can always make it smaller, adding  back on is tricky. At the center line I cut out a semi-circle big enough to fit  comfortably around my neck. You have to start with a log large enough to leave a decent bit of wood behind the neck hole, this one was about 8 inches in diameter.

 

I next carved and whittled off every bit of extra wood that I could. Less wood, less weight. The carrying shafts on each end need to be at the center of the shoulder so that the load will pull straight down rather than twisting the yoke. I tried to shape the inside surface to fit uniformly across my shoulders so that the load will be spread evenly. After I had it fitting as well as I could I added a thick layer of felt as padding. I used material from a old tee shirt to cover and hold the felt in place.

The fabric is stretchy so that made it fairly easy to get all the wrinkles out. I used staples to attach it. If we have a good year I could easily have 700-800 gallons of sap to get in. A lot of that will need to be carried by hand so this should make that task a little easier. Since some of those trees are over 300 yards from the sap cooker every little bit helps.

Home Made Felt

These are my three recent tries at felt making. Overall I am happy with them  and I learned a lot about the process of making felt. The actual method of making felt is simple enough, get the wool wet and agitate. That does not indicate the amount of physical effort that must be applied however.On my first attempt I just tossed some globs of wool and llama fiber in the bottom of a plastic tub with hot soapy water and started smooshing them around. I did eventually felt them together.

As to making something useful, no, I did not. To make a piece of nice more or less flat ,smooth felt, a different method is needed. After doing fifteen minutes of extensive research (goggle!), I went back for another try. First off, separate out the fiber and lay them out in a thin layer the size you want. Now, make another thin layer, laid across the direction of the first layer. I built up six or seven layers until I had a pile about six inches thick as it lay.

You can get a rough estimate of how thick your finished piece will be by pressing down on the pile with your hand. This pile ended up making a piece of felt about 3/8 of an inch thick. I don't know if more work would have produced a thinner, and thus denser, finished piece or if that is a function of what type of fiber is used. My thinner pile of three layers made a piece about 1/8 of a inch thick. The three I have made thus far are all alternate layers of wool and then llama fiber.

After the fiber pile is as thick as it is wanted, wet it with very hot, soapy, water, but not too much. You want the fiber uniformly wet but with little excess water. Take my word for it, too much water will prevent the wool from forming a nice uniform layer. As you can see, this will shrink you pile down to a thin layer. I flattened it by patting it and pressing it down with my hands and continued until it starts to form a cohesive layer. It is still fuzzy and stuck to my rough hands when I pressed it.

At that point it is still a long ways from felt but it stuck together enough to slide it onto a sheet of plastic. Then I rolled it up like a jelly roll and slid heavy rubber bands around it every couple inches. I saw several sites on the web that used bubble wrap for this but I didn't have any so couldn't  try that. After my first try I placed the pile of fiber on the plastic to start with. I am not sure if you would really need the rubber bands but it made it easy to keep it all rolled up.

Now the work part started. While putting enough downward pressure to flatten the roll a bit, I rolled it back and forth. I moved my hands from end to end as I went so that all parts were getting the same treatment. It is easy but gets tiring after a while. I switched and used my foot to roll it back and forth for a while. After about 15 minutes of rolling I stopped and took a peek. Not bad, but I thought I could do a little better. I gave it about 5 more minutes of rolling.

Here it is. The pile of fiber covered the tray so you can see how much shrinkage there was. The tray is 17 x 25 inches and the usable area of the felt is about 13 x 17 inches.Some areas along the edges did not get tightly felted so I will trim those off. I already have a have dozen projects in mind that will use some of the felt and I have a huge pile of fiber to work with. Ann has put in her order and is planning to make some house slippers with some. I have several ideas on improving my production methods. If anyone out there has experience making felt I'd love to hear from you.

Spring Projects

Maple syrup season is slowly getting started here on the homestead.We tapped about 75 trees Friday. Saturday it rained and last night and today we received about 8 inches of snow. Of course we started tapping close to the cabin and we use our buckets close so we don't have as far to move them. The down side of that is that they are now all full of snow and rain so we will have to dump them all tomorrow if it is done snowing. Then I will go and repack the trails I have stumped down over the last week with my snow shoes. Hopefully we will get the warmer weather they were predicting. I have at least 40 more buckets to use and 100 sap bags. A lot of the trees I will be using the sap bags on are larger trees and they will get two taps each. Then I use a plastic line tap and a section of tubing to run both taps into one bag.  A few of the trees I tapped Friday ran a bit so it looks like things should take off if it warms up a little.

Our garden seed orders have arrived so I will have to get busy in the green house soon also. This year we ordered all of our seeds from Johnny's Select Seeds and from The Seed Savers Exchange .Everything arrived as ordered so we are all set. We are trying quite a few new species this year such as a artichoke which can be grown as a annual and bulb fennel. I like to have different things at market along with the foraged wild foods that we offer.

Washing Wool

This picture is of a portion of the flock of up to 80 Shetland Sheep we formerly kept. Then, for various reasons, we sold off most of our flock, but not before we had a huge pile of wool in our hay loft. Commercial wool buyers want white wool, not colored fleeces. Most shepherds of small flocks like ours don't receive enough from the sale of the wool to cover the cost of having the sheep sheared. A big part of the cost of wool yarn is due to the processing it takes to get it to that point, processing wool is a time consuming project.

Our answer to this situation is, do it ourselves. Ann sheared them herself.  Since we wouldn't sell the raw fleeces to most commercial buyers for what they offered we had few other options. Number one, take it all to a custom woolen mill and have it processed. Or, number two, do it ourselves. While Ann sometimes hinted that it would be nice to just get it all processed I am to much of a tightwad to go that route. After crunching all the numbers it was plain to me that the only one making any money on our wool would have been the woolen mill.

We still have a big pile of wool in our hay loft and recently I had another one of my brilliant ideas. I have wanted to make a insulated blanket that will roll down over the front of my green house on cold   nights to help hold the heat in. What could be better than a wool quilt?! Off I went to the hayloft to get some wool and start my project. My first step when I got it back to the cabin was to pull out the nicer sections of the fleece and soak them in some nice warm soapy water. After letting it soak for a couple hours I drained it and did it again.

Care must be taken when washing wool so as not to make it into a big lump of felt. Agitating the wool while it is wet is a big no-no as is rapid changes to water temperature. If you don't do those two things every thing will be alright. I used cheap dish washing detergent to do this.Here in the bottom picture is my first batch of wool spread on some screens to dry. It was about then that Ann came in and looked over the wool. " This is nice looking wool",she said. "Look at the crimp in it". " This would spin nice", she said. Do you see where this is going?  So anyway, I'm going to take some of the yucky stuff and the parts with lots of chafe in them and make greenhouse quilts with that.

DIY Leather Dressing

My leather work boots are almost three years old and are still in good condition and water resistant thanks to the leather dressing I put on every month or so. Winter weather sees me using a lot of this so I am making some today. I have tried several commercial products and find this homemade version at least as good and a lot less expensive. At least part of the reason this stuff is effective is because it is inexpensive so I slather it on thick and often. I make up a large batch once a year. I make two versions, one with and one without the neatsfoot oil. The version without neatsfoot oil gets a lot of use too. I rub it onto wooden spoons, and other unfinished wood items to help protect them.  I also use it to coat steel items that are prone to rust when not in use. I rub down the column and table on the drill press and the table saw table. A very thin coat is all that is required to keep them rust free. This is basically bees wax with enough mineral oil added to make an easy to apply paste. The exact ratio is not exact!. About half and half, if that is too stiff add more oil, if it's to thin add more wax! I put the mineral oil in a pan, let it heat up, and then stir in bees wax. You should use a double boiler for safety. For the boot dressing,  I do the same thing except after I have removed the mix from the heat and it has cooled enough to start thickening I add in a generous dollop of the neatsfoot oil. Again, no exact recipe here, I just dump in a half cup or so in a batch that is about two cups. My work shoes used to fall apart due to rotten thread at the top of the sole. This stuff soaks into the threads and water proofs them as well as sealing the leather to make it shed water. They are still leather though so if you use them for waders you are gonna get wet feet!

Sad Day at Forest House Farm

 Yesterday was a sad day on our homestead. Despite spending the last several weeks trying, we were not able to find enough hay, at a price we could afford, to keep our milk cow. We have already spent more than three times our normal hay budget and still needed more to get us through the winter. It was a tough call but we had to put our cow on the cattle buyers truck. We sometimes raise calves up to butcher or to sell for butcher but the family milk cow falls in a different category. If we were still milking a herd it would be different too. When you have a milking herd there have to be some decisions made based strictly on profit motives or you will not be farming for long. When we got Sissy, our cow, we expected to keep her for a long time so we treated her more as a pet than we would have otherwise. Any animal we have is treated with respect and cared for gently but those we are going to part with are kept out of our heart. We hadn't planned on parting with this one.
 On top of all that there is also a feeling that we somehow failed, that we didn't plan well. We have been buying hay for winter feed for years and never had to sell of livestock before to keep going. This year the prices are two to four times higher than what we paid last year, I certainly didn't plan for that. Then ,the big jump in fuel prices over the last week, made hauling hay in from areas with no shortages, just as expensive. All of this has left a bitter taste in our mouths  and a lot of doubt about the direction we should go with our homestead.

Pruning Apple Trees

Apple trees, as with many fruit trees, should be pruned while they are dormant. I do mine about now because soon the maple sap will start running and from there on it seems we just get busier and busier. My pictures didn't turn out very good so these will have to do. In this picture I am indicating a sucker or shoot coming up from the base of the tree. Always remove all of these. The basic principle  to keep in mind when pruning your apple trees is to open up the center of the tree. Those branches that go towards the center of the tree should be removed.

Branches that form a very sharp "v" should also be removed since they will be weaker than a more square joint and more likely to split under the weight of a good crop of apples. Cut the limb off with a very sharp pair of shears. Make your cut just past a bud that will grow in the direction you want, away from the center of the tree. All of the decisions are made in light of the fact that many apple trees are what is known as " spur bearing'. This means the apples are on spurs  rather than on the actual branch.

If you prune off a lot of spurs you will reduce the yield considerably. I try to limit the height of my trees somewhat by pruning off the leaders and forcing the tree to grow horizontally  instead.Other spots to consider are branches that are to low, branches that are rubbing another branch, and branches that are very close to another branch. Often you have to decide which is the main objective since doing everything would leave you with a  lone stalk! Yearly pruning gives you a chance to correct faults before they are a big deal.
This last picture is of all the scion wood I saved to graft onto root stock later this spring. As long as the tree you are pruning from is not patented stock it is perfectly fine to save these and do your own propagation.  Root stock can be purchased for a variety of purposes including cold hardiness, dwarfing and semi-dwarfing.