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| Sunrise on Wednesday. |
We had a tiny teasing taste of spring last week. For several days the temperature rose into the 50's and everything began to thaw. It rained on Friday morning and that washed away a lot of the snow. Nature responded to the warmth immediately. The snowdrops burst into bloom as soon as the snow was gone. I had to stand and admire them for a long while. They are so hardy and they make me so happy when I see them at last. With the warmth also came the birds. All in a day we had robins, grackles, cowbirds, and killdeer everywhere. Every morning now I’m greeted by the singing of the red-winged blackbirds. We saw our first turkey vultures on Saturday. Down on the ponds there were mergansers, wood ducks, and even a migrating tundra swan.
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| Snowdrops at last! |
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| Grackles, cowbirds, and red-winged blackbirds at the feeders. |
The thaw softened the frozen ground and we had our first round of puddles and mud. The usual temporary pond formed at the side of the house where the ground is low. If there is anything to dislike about spring, for me it is the mud. The thawed ground becomes so soggy, it’s like walking on a sponge. And our dirt road becomes a mess of rutted mud. I took a walk up to the hollow and back on the first day of the thaw. I sloshed and slipped in mud the whole way. I love it when spring settles in and things dry out a bit.
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| The pond puddle at the side of the house. |
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| Headed in the mud to the hollow. |
I couldn’t resist doing some yard work during the thaw. On Friday I raked out the parts of the flower beds that were free of snow. They were full of winter debris. Under the soggy leaves, pine needles, and twigs, there were plenty of crocus, daffodil, and tulip shoots emerging. There was also an abundance of weeds. I’m pretty sure the weeds sprout and grow under the snow all winter. I know they weren’t there when I cleaned the beds out last fall. I didn’t have time to do any weeding on Friday. That will have to wait for a longer spell of warmer weather.
The warm weather did not last. By the weekend the cold had come back. Yesterday morning we awoke to a light dusting of snow and there were flurries off and on through the day. It looks like winter has taken hold of things for the next week and probably longer. The first official day of spring is this Wednesday.
Another sure sign of the approach of spring is the arrival of maple season. The sap is rising in the trees, the woods are full of taps and buckets and tubes, and the sugar shacks are fired up. Yesterday the local maple producers hosted tours of their facilities. There are at least seventeen of them in Potter and Tioga counties, even more if you add in the Amish. Stacey and I visited three of them yesterday. First we went to Hamilton’s Maple Farm just over the hill from us in Bingham Township. They’ve been boiling sap for four generations since the mid-1800's. They tap over 9,000 trees. They recently expanded their operation and have a big new evaporator. We sampled their maple mustard and maple peanut butter. It was all so delicious.
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| Headed over the hill to Hamilton's. |
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| Hamilton's evaporator. |
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| In Hamilton's store. |
The second place we visited was Wending Creek Farms, which is owned by the people that Stacey, Hannah, Miriam, and Josiah work for. Josiah was actually working at the Wending Creek sugar shack all day helping to give tours. He came home quite knowledgeable about the whole thing. Wending Creek taps 6,000 trees.
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| Sap buckets on the way to Wending Creek's sugar shack. |
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| More sap buckets. |
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| Most of the sap is collected by tubes. |
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| Josiah and a reverse osmosis machine. |
The third place we stopped at was Brydonson Farms out on Ayers Hill in Homer Township. The Ianson family has been producing maple syrup for seven generations. They tap 11,000 trees. They had a demonstration of the old open kettle method used by early syrup makers. Their modern evaporator was pretty impressive. They still use wood to fire it. The steam and the fragrance of the maple in their sugar shack felt and smelled wonderful on a cold and windy winter afternoon.
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| Boiling sap the old fashioned way at Ianson's. |
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| Ianson's evaporator. |
Making maple syrup is quite a process. The early European settlers learned how to make it from the Native Americans. The Natives heated rocks and dropped them into a wooden trough full of sap to slowly reduce it to syrup or crystallized sugar. I’ve always wondered how they ever thought to do that. The settlers soon began using large kettles over wood fires. Now most of the syrup makers use some pretty modern, sophisticated equipment – reverse osmosis machines to take out water before the boiling begins, big multi-chambered gas-fired evaporators, and filtering systems. Even so, it still takes thirty gallons of raw sap to make one gallon of syrup. There’s nothing quite like pure maple syrup. It is nothing like the maple flavored corn syrup most people are used to. Unlike refined sugar, it even has some actual nutritional value. It contains antioxidants, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and vitamin B6. I love to drizzle it in my oatmeal. And maple cream on salt rising toast is about as good as it gets. Now I’ve made myself hungry. When will lunch be ready?
Speaking of lunch – today is St. Patrick’s Day and we are not having corned beef and cabbage for lunch. We didn’t plan for it. Instead, we are having spaghetti and garlic bread – still delicious, but not quite Irish. We all wore green to church today, so at least we observed some tradition. I don’t have any Irish blood in me, but Stacey does and so our children do. I guess I’m only Irish through marriage. Oh well. Éirinn go Brách!
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| After church (Miriam and Hannah are down visiting the Thayns). |
