Forget Mardi Gras beads and birthday cake (two birthday cakes, actually, plus a King Cake, because we are all about the baked excess), maybe I should mention we have bottle lambs.
Yup. For the first time in the five years we've had lambs, we have two that A. is feeding by himself. They're two vigorous male lambs and their mother, though willing, never produced any appreciable milk. So A. trudges out to the pasture every six hours or so to feed them with a bottle. I think it's making him very appreciative that our own offspring have never had to have bottles. Pain in the ass, for sure. But the lambs are doing well.
The current lamb count is four. One female, three males, and two unfortunate lambs we lost earlier. Sad.
Also, I should mention that we started tapping maple trees this past weekend. My visiting mom and sister came with us to put in the spiles on Saturday. A definite act of bravery, considering the horrid wind and low temperatures. My sister also cleaned all the buckets and spiles for us.
Seriously, WHY does anyone visit me anymore?
Anyway. The sap is running now. We've collected about ten gallons from our trees in the past couple of days, and Mr. Jason, who is obviously completely insane, put in 70 spiles.
You read that right: 70. Mr. Jason is obviously either working on building up his pectorals by hauling a thousand pounds of sap, or totally crazy. I'm going with crazy.
So there's going to be a LOT of boiling of sap this year. Also a lot of maple syrup. Hooray. We're out, so we gotta get on that.
That's all for now. Over and out.
3 comments:
70??? Wow. I hope you have a lot of firewood for all the boiling! Maybe you've talked about this but I can't remember...did you ever make maple sugar? It is one of those 'hot' ingredients right now that I keep seeing mention of in food magazines. I saw some at Whole Foods for an outrageous price recently. The lambs are darling!
Isn't it VERY early to be tapping?
Anonymous: No. Last year the spiles went in on Feb. 1 and we were done by mid-March. That was a couple of weeks earlier than normal. Around here, anytime from February to March is sugaring time. As long as it's above freezing during the day and below freezing at night, the sap runs.
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