Modern Inconveniences

It is surprising how many everyday tasks we now use electricity to do. A good example that I never gave a thought to before we went off grid was making a slice of toast. Living with the amount of electricity that a couple of car batteries holds makes electric toasters out of the question. During cold weather the wood fire in our cook stove does the job in about the same amount of time an electric toaster would. The big difference is that when you put your bread on the stove, it is not advisable to walk away unless you like your toast very dark!

 Making coffee is another example. An old fashion percolator does that job easily, on the cook stove in winter and often over a campfire in summer. We also have a bottle gas cook stove which is fine for the percolator but does not work that well for making toast. It is easy to understand why our ancestors abandoned many of the traditional methods of doing some of these sorts of tasks when electricity became commonly available. Convenience. It is so much easier to push down the lever on the toaster and go about your business compared to standing next to a hot cook stove and watching that your toast doesn't go up in smoke.If I put on a pot of coffee and run out side on some errand and forget about it, I end up drinking very strong coffee. Using electricity is really about saving time. All of the automated appliances save time for you to do other things. Not using all that electricity makes you stay with the task at hand. Most times, getting that slightly smokey slice of toast fresh off the fire and spreading some home made butter or jam on it is well worth the time spent standing still and watching for a bit.

Lily, Our German Shepard Dog

Meet the latest addition to our family. This is Lily, a registered German Shepard Dog, who is nine weeks old. We got her from a friend of ours, Lisa Slattery, owner of Dirt Road Kennel. She is a sharp little pup, already comes to her name and sits for her treats. The house cats are not as impressed as I am!
  On the maple syrup front, it is full speed ahead. It is rapidly approaching our best year ever. Even though the sugar content seems a little low the trees are producing sap at a tremendous rate. If by some chance the weather forecasters are right we should have at least another week of good syrup making weather. I have several hundred gallons of sap waiting right now and haven't collected yet today. Fire wood has become my big problem. I did not have nearly enough cooker wood lined up for this years run so I am making it on the go. The reason we are having such a good year is the weather of course. While I love it from a sugar making direction , UGGGG! I am sick of snow! Here is the view when I went out yesterday.

 It was only a few inches but that was a few inches on top of the foot to a foot and a half that is still there. It has rained several times too and with that and the snow that has melted, when you step through the snow it is as likely as not that there is six inches of water under it. I've pulled over a hundred taps because the water is too deep to move around in easily. These were all taps that are a long ways from the cabin and it was too hard to get them emptied every day. I still have close to two hundred in so I won't run out of work .
 Don't even ask about the green house. The cabin is over flowing with seed trays. I will have to keep them in here at least until they germinate. By then maybe I'll be done with cutting wood for the maple syrup cooker and I can start cutting for the green house heater.

Busy,Busy,Busy

Maple syrup season has finally gotten to our neck of the woods. It is later than it has been for quite a few years but it is shaping up to be a good year for production if the weather continues the way it has been. Of course, weather it the determining factor in sap production, it needs to be warm during the day and freeze at night for the sap to run. We have had those conditions here and the trees are giving us a nice run. Yesterday the average per tap run was a little over a quart of sap per tap. With almost 300 taps in that meant about 80 gallons of sap which should give us over two gallons of syrup once it is cooked down. My biggest challenge now will be cutting fire wood for the cooker fast enough to keep that sap boiling. We still have over two feet of snow in the woods in many places so working in that wet snow makes slow going.
Our other project is getting the green house set up and this years seeds started. I'll need about twenty flats again this year. The weather is not good for this project since those freezing nights mean I need to heat the green house. Guess I'd better get back to work, I need more fire wood!