This morning we had an acquaintance of ours from across town attempt to drop in via hot air balloon. The wind didn’t quite cooperate, but we were able to exchange hellos. He runs a balloon ride business over in the village of Post Mills. Got me to thinking what sort of air current effects he’d [...]

This was the third day in a row that we boiled just about the same amount – about 30 gallons of maple syrup. We started our first 55 gallon drum with tonight’s maple syrup, hopefully the first of many. We’re learning how to better fire the arch, using less wood and keeping the front pan [...]

It was getting to be a bit late in the night on one of those looooong boils last year. Several of us started sniffing the air. Was that something burning? Sometimes a car goes by burning a break pad, skidding around our nasty curve on Tucker Hill Road. It was easy to dismiss the first [...]

Yesterday I wrote about the construction Robert and Mike did with the tearing out of the wood that’ll be sitting near the newly enlarged stack hole at the top of the sugar house. This morning I happened to be out there while we were plowing the adjacent farm yard area, so I took this shot [...]

We bricked up the “new” old arch in the sugarhouse. The maple syrup crew reconvened in the sugarhouse during exceptionally cold weather (otherwise we’d have been out in the bush putting up maple lines) and worked inside. We patched up the big holes in the windows – with quaint and scenic duct tape – and [...]

Today the guys and I went out to Enfield, NH to haul back an old 3′ by 10′ evaporator to replace our tiny 2′ by 5.5′ unit that served us the past couple few years. While the little unit should have been enough for what we were doing, it turned out to be less efficient [...]