Port Potager

We've been on a springtime weather roller coaster here the past several days, bouncing from balmy to brisk and back again. It was another big weekend in the garden, with lots of bed prep and planting (leeks, onions, carrots, parsnips, radishes, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, and potatoes). My hamstrings and hands are still sore, but we got a lot done. It would be a shame, though, to focus only on the to-do list without enjoying all the little changes that spring brings to the garden. Here's what's blooming: Bulbs are up in the perennial border, and these blue glory-of-the-snow get better each year. We inherited them and they have naturalized nicely. There are also some darker blue Siberian squill, which are just starting to come up. We removed the spills from the sugar maple now that sugaring season is done. The wound should heal over by autumn. More blue! These sky blue muscari bulbs are in the cutting bed, but I never actually cut them down.  ...

As of this weekend, our maple sugaring season is over. The trees haven't budded out yet, but the sap has slowed way down now that we aren't getting below freezing temperatures at nighttime any more. We boiled down our last three pints of syrup over the weekend, and next weekend we will be dismantling the fire pit , taking out the spiles , and cleaning everything up to pack away for next year. 2014 maple sugaring stats: 4 taps (3 in our sugar maple and 1 in our Norway maple) 32 days of collecting sap 80-90 gallons of sap 17 1/2 pints of maple syrup The one thing I didn't keep records of was the obscene amount of firewood we burned through to make this happen. I do now that we spent a lot of money on it, because we were getting it at the hardware store by the bag. In the future, we plan to build a small woodshed behind the garage and order a half-cord or cord in the fall, which will see us through any emergency fires we'd need to light due to a power ...

Now that the maples are tapped and we've been collecting sap for several days, it's time to turn that sap into syrup!  We decided to do this the old-fashioned way, over a fire: First we had to dig out a hole in the snow on our patio to make a place to set our fire bowl. You could also do this on your grill in a pinch, but our fire bowl is bigger. It's not an ideal set-up, but we're too poor for a fancy evaporator , and we don't have any cinder blocks on hand to build a temporary fire pit . The drawback with using the fire bowl is that you have to remove the grate and pans of boiling syrup to re-stoke the fire every so often. That's not hard, but it does slow things down because the pans have to get back up to temperature after they've cooled a little. If we built a cinder block contraption to contain the fire but give us access to add wood on the side, that would be more efficient. Maybe next time! Anyway, here is our actual fire getting ...

Now that our trees are tapped, we need to check the buckets every day. Otherwise, they'll be overflowing on warm afternoons when the sap is really flowing fast. It's easy to do. First, slide the pin out to remove the lid:  Of course, you can lift the lid to take a peek first. This bucket is getting full, so we need to empty it into our storage containers: This photo was from the weekend, when it was cold enough over night for some of the sap to freeze (you can see the ice on the surface above). When this happens, you just throw the ice away. Here's a big chunk I picked out of another bucket: It may seem wasteful, but if it is frozen, that part doesn't have much sugar in it anyway. Think of it this way: Have you ever tried to freeze fruit juice for a toothpick popsicle, only to be disappointed in how soft it was? That's because sugar lowers the freezing point of water. Therefore you can be pretty sure that the frozen part is just water, a...

I don't want to jinx it, but I think our time in the Polar Vortex might be coming to a close. As far as the eye can see on the weather forecast (okay, so about 10 days), the daytime temperatures will be above freezing.  Woo hoo! This is exciting not just because it's warm enough to be outside without freezing your face off — it's also maple sugaring season! That means it's above freezing during the day (probably around 40 degrees) and below freezing at night (probably back in the 20s). We're finally having a stretch of weather like that, and this year we got the tools we needed to give it a try. Here's what you need and how to do it: First, you need a maple tree. We have two:  a great big one in the front yard , and a much smaller one in the back. You can tap any old maple you like, but a sugar maple is best (obviously — the name doesn't come outta nowhere!)  I'm fairly confident that the tree we have in the front is, in fact, a sugar ...