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On the Road Again with Merle

In the garden we primarily focus on tomatoes and green beans. Occasionally sweet corn, but not this year. It’s hard to beat homemade canned salsa and spaghetti sauce. And pickled beets!



Back behind the house in the woods is a good size ravine that meanders through the property. In runs pretty strong in the springtime after the snow melts, but in this dry summer it is just a tiny trickle.



That gives a nice tour of my property. Next time we’ll explore further out.

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Thanks guys!

Horsewright said:
Wow great shots and love the history! Beautiful country. Funny how different things are different places. Not exactly what I would call a dry summer, I was thinking it was looking pretty lush!
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Yeah I suppose that is true. But when we average 4 feet of rain per year, and so far this year only have about 20 inches, it is particularly dry. One of the worst in the past 20 years. Folks around here start to panic if the grass starts to turn brown!
 
Beautiful scenery. The cider press was cool. I helped with one at a fair that came to middle school. It was pretty neat. Very nice property too. I have an 18 acres but sadly no water.
 
Rookie82 said:
Thanks guys!



Yeah I suppose that is true. But when we average 4 feet of rain per year, and so far this year only have about 20 inches, it is particularly dry. One of the worst in the past 20 years. Folks around here start to panic if the grass starts to turn brown!
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Year before it never even turned green in the springtime! At least it greened up this year. Bout four years ago was our wettest year ever recorded. We had 48” that year. We average 12-15” and feel blessed when its an average year.
 
Horsewright said:
Year before it never even turned green in the springtime! At least it greened up this year. Bout four years ago was our wettest year ever recorded. We had 48” that year. We average 12-15” and feel blessed when its an average year.
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I appreciate when I travel how diverse the United States is. Every area has its own beauty. But I admit after being in Las Vegas for 5 days on a vacation years ago, I was eager to see some green again.
 
Yesterday I went about and came up with this nice selection of information and photos to post for today's Merle excursion.

For those that remember the “Pearl” thread a few years back, you know that my family makes maple syrup. I am the 5th generation of our family to make syrup, and some of the trees we tap are ones that my great-great-grandfather planted himself on the Bradshaw farm.

We make syrup on my dad's property, so I visited there to take some photos. He lives 1 mile down the road fro me.

Here is a row of trees my dad planted along his driveway back in the 1980’s.



This is our maple syrup “Sugar House”, which for 11 months out of the year is just a cluttered storage building. But in late February to early March, it is bustling with activity. It’s not syrup season now, but I can still give a good tour of our process.



My wife, and dad, and I (along with occasional siblings or cousins help) tap about 600 maple trees, and on average get about 90-100 gallons of syrup. We still do things the old fashioned way, and each tap gets a bucket to hang on the tree and collect the sap.

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We then gather the sap when the trees run. If the weather cooperates, we may be gathering sap every day from all 600 buckets, for 3 weeks non-stop. After 3 weeks, the trees start healing shut and the sap doesn’t flow much more.

Timing is critical. The weather has to be over 40 degrees during the day, and under 30 degrees at night, for the trees to cycle the sap up and down the trunk, making the sap “run”. If you tap too early in the year, you won’t get warm enough days to get any sap before the trees heal shut. And if you tap too late, the nights won’t be cold enough. It’s a fine science, with a bit of luck and experience mixed in.

We pull an old hay wagon around the woods behind the big tractor, and gather up all the sap. Each bucket holds 2-3 gallon of sap, so on a good day we can bring in 1000-1500 gallons of sap.

You can imagine what the trail looks like after 3 weeks of driving the giant tractor around in the soft melting snow covered muddy woods. Some of these ruts are 2 feet deep!

Here is a photo of Merle sitting on the tractor.



Here is a video from 2017 of our family heading into the woods to gather maple sap.


Once the sap is hauled back to the sugar house, it is pumped inside and we start to boil it down in the evaporator.

We have my grandpa’s old evaporator from the 1940’s that we’ve rebuilt over and over, and then in the 80’s my dad bought a larger evaporator so that we can cook the syrup faster. You only get about 1 gallon of syrup for 50 gallons of sap, so you need to boil as fast as possible to get rid of all the water. The big evaporator will boil about 140 gallons per hour if the weather cooperates, so you can imagine how many long hours go into this process.

This is a photo of our small and large evaporator with Merle.

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So for the 11 months prior to making syrup, we need to have wood ready to go. There is an Amish sawmill not far from our house that we trade syrup to, and we get green cutoffs from. So we need to get that wood, and stack it so that it is dry and ready to go before syrup season starts. We usually burn through about 20 cords of wood in 3 weeks.

Here is a photo of our wood pile next to our other tractor, and then a photo with Merle. See if you can find Merle hiding in it. And a photo from a few years ago, my wife feeding wood into the firebox as fast as possible.



Once the syrup is nearly ready, we finish it over a propane burner so we can control the heat precisely, then filter it, and store it in drums until it is ready to jug. Then off it goes, we sell to friends and family.



So around this area, there are probably 50 other families that I know of that make syrup. It was a way for family farms to make a little extra money back in the day. As every farm had sections of woods around the fields, and Feb-Mar is a slow time of year for farmers. Also, sugar used to be rare and expensive, so most families preferred to make their own from maple syrup. If you keep cooking it longer, it will harden up (similar to hard tack candy), and then you can break it up into sugar granules. My family back in the 1800’s used to make 20 gallons of maple syrup just for themselves to last a year, with about ½ of that boiled down further all the way to sugar, so they could use it for all their baking needs.

This year 2022 was one of the worst years for maple syrup we’ve had. The weather warmed up very quickly in March, reaching nearly 65 degrees one day. That caused the trees to heal shut faster than normal, and we ended only getting about ¼ the sap that we normally get in a season.

Oh well, as with all things farming. You can’t control the weather, and you can only make hay when the sun shines! It’s an expensive hobby, but addictive. And it brings the family together.

Our motto with maple syrup is “We’ve been losing money every year for 5 generations!!!”

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Another novelty I can share here with the group, we have the record largest Red Maple tree in the entire state of Pennsylvania here on our property. We had it professionally measured and scored, and it is certified as the largest known tree of that species in PA. They estimate it at 350+ years old. It is nearly 19 foot circumference around the trunk.

Here is a photo of my dad by the tree with his English Mastiff pup.



All this excitement over maple syrup got me wanting some pancakes with eggs and bacon for lunch! Merle was happy to belly up to the table.

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Carl, I am absolutely loving your posts and I can’t wait until you post more. Thank you for taking us behind the scenes of your farm life. Absolutely beautiful country, I am craving pancakes, eggs, bacon, and maple syrup myself now!! This wonderful hobby you share with your grandpa is absolutely priceless. 👍👊
- Peter
 
Rookie82 said:
Another novelty I can share here with the group, we have the record largest Red Maple tree in the entire state of Pennsylvania here on our property. We had it professionally measured and scored, and it is certified as the largest known tree of that species in PA. They estimate it at 350+ years old. It is nearly 19 foot circumference around the trunk.

Here is a photo of my dad by the tree with his English Mastiff pup.

View attachment 1908414View attachment 1908415

All this excitement over maple syrup got me wanting some pancakes with eggs and bacon for lunch! Merle was happy to belly up to the table.

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Very interesting and great pics!
 
Rookie82 said:
For those that remember the “Pearl” thread a few years back, you know that my family makes maple syrup.
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I remember it well. 🤠:thumbsup:
Rookie82 said:
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So very cool. 🤠:thumbsup::thumbsup:
Rookie82 said:
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Now THAT'S a breakfast. 🤠:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:
 
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