"Do you want my leftover bacon?" -Said no one ever.

What happened to Farmer Phil? Well, if I thought summer was bad for blogging, at least it was a good time to get out of the heat for a little while. Suddenly it is the middle of September and you realize you have barely any hay in the barn and no firewood for the house or the sugar shack. And many of the animals need to have some major life changes coming their way- breeding, weaning, processing, moving. So begins the fall sprint. When the days are nice enough to work on all of the things you blew off all summer. It is my favorite season though and with a little luck and help from good friends and family, it somehow comes together enough to make it through to another year. Anyway, here is some info on our piggies and how we raise them. Thanks for reading!

Pastured Pork: Our definition.

Pasture Raised Pork is a name that really has no definition. Similar to Free-range and organic at one point, the name can be applied to a wide variety of methods of raising pork and as such, can be misused. At Coombs Farm, we have a method we have been refining since we started raising pigs and we wanted to explain it.

Our mothers have been raised outside from the day they came to us at about 8 weeks old. From this day, we began to look for ones who were independent, yet social enough to work together. From this, we have raised our breeding stock of three sows. We have a Berkshire boar that is on pasture with the girls for two months when breeding time comes, otherwise, he gets his own pasture, which we think he prefers!

Our girls Wendy, Michelle, and Pinky.

They all give birth to their piglets on pasture in individual huts. As the time nears, they begin to choose a hut and separate from each other. They will make a “nest” of hay and shavings that we provide and pregnancy begins. This is the harder part and why many don’t pasture birth, or farrow. If you took a sow and put her in a field and just waited, it would end badly. Through the careful selection process, our mothers are attentive to their litter on the pasture from day one. We rarely have to assist in the process but we do stand by and watch closely. We also take the time to clip the piglets needle teeth if they have them so they don’t hurt the sow.

About a half hour after the last piglet-all nursing away!

 

Often within a few days, she will bring the piglets outside and nurse in the sun and play in the dirt. Eventually, they merge into one big ball of piglets that run around the pasture like 6 year olds playing soccer for the first time. They will nurse for six weeks while they learn to eat and drink on their own. After they are fully weaned, they get a pasture of their own until they reach market weight. While our method is more labor intensive initially, the result is stronger piglets more resistant to disease, weaned earlier and overall more adjusted to pasture life than other pigs. They can grow quickly but with less fat and more muscle, making for superior pork. As we like to say, “A happy pig is a tasty pig” and ours are ecstatic!

“Why does this matter?”

To some people it doesn’t. We began farming to raise better food and in doing so we believe that giving an animal the best life possible while it is on earth is the best food.

 

Three days later, Wendy began taking the litter out and enjoying the sunshine!

What our pigs don’t have:

Iron Shots: Iron occurs naturally in the earth which is part of the reason why pigs root in the ground. In a normal operation, a shot must be given because the piglets can’t root. This can damage the meat long term at the injection site and some can taste a tin like flavor.

Growth Hormones: We feed grain, grass and water, (Also our goat’s milk when the seasons allow). There is no reason to cheat with a drug that no one can say is safe and we don’t need!

 Antibiotics: Other piglets are born sickly and need medicated feed or anti-biotic preventative shots. While we would treat a sick animal if needed, we don’t do it as a precaution because our method keeps the animals healthy naturally.

 Junk: Ever see the farmer with loads of bread or day old donuts in the back of his truck? Guess what he is raising? Fat, gross, pigs. We pride ourselves on the end product being lean and delicious. Not something you get from stale hot dog rolls and moldy cookies. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Guest Blogger : Kanning Karen

As some of you may have noticed or pointed out, Farmer Phil has not made any recent blog posts.  I would love to say this is because he has been off enjoying his summer, lounging at the beach, building campfires or taking me on a fancy vacation.  Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately depending on how you look at it, we have had a very busy summer.  Besides continually rotating the sheep to fresh pastures, keeping the barn and house standing, catching whoever is loose, fixing whatever is broke and feeding whoever is hungry we have added some new critters to the farm.  We have eight new goat kids, who combined with the four born this year are providing high quality brush clearing services.  Farmer Phil has recently built a prototype chicken tractor (it’s smaller scale version of the ones Joel Salatin uses at Polyface farms, who is a big inspiration for some of our crazier ideas) which we are using to move 25 broiler chickens around the front yard, and finally we have our first batch of turkeys getting ready for their big day in November. 

Since Farmer Phil is undoubtedly outside doing something necessary to prepare for winter, like stacking wood or hay, I figured I would lend a hand with the blog. 

Circa: Not Recently

It is really hard to believe that it is already September, but with the cooler breezes and the sun setting earlier every day it is clear summer is behind us.  As with every year we seemed to have some successes and failures with our gardens.  We have beets, Swiss chard, herbs, cucumbers, peaches and tomatoes by the bushel load.  Our peppers seem to be late but are coming in now and the beans had a good run early in the summer and we have been successful with the carrots.  The onions, garlic and potatoes did well until the weeds started to overtake them (lesson learned, use mulch).  Our lettuce and broccoli seemed to spend more time flowering and bolting than being productive and the squash beetles found my pumpkins.  Finally there are the peas, I love peas, I am determined to have peas, they grow, they wither, I replant, and Farmer Phil laughs, but I will have peas.

Dill Cucumber Relish

With all this overabundance of some things and a desire to enjoy the benefits of the garden throughout the year I have begun canning.  I started a few years ago with a dear friend and have been trying to branch out into various recipes.  I still have not managed the science of determining how many jars of what we will use until spring and then backward planning my garden to ensure we will have enough to make the recipes.  I have found canning to be part art, part science and a big part luck.  This year I have made peach salsa, peach jam, maple bourbon peach sauce, dilly beans, cucumber dill relish, cherry tomato salsa, garlic basil tomato sauce, mint simple syrup and lemon balm simple syrup with plenty more left to do.  Canning tends to be a late night activity after dinner is made and cleaned up, then the kitchen is free for canning and somewhere around midnight when even the dog is snoring I am done.  Farmer Phil compares my canning season to his maple season.  Despite all the hard work of harvesting, prepping and late hours there is nothing more satisfying to hear the lid pop on that last jar in the bunch.  If you haven’t given it a try I highly recommend it.  Feel free to send any recipes this way too (especially ones that deal with giant cucumbers that seem to hide in the garden until they have grown to the size of baseball bats!)

(Farmer Phil is allowed to select all art work for guest bloggers)

 

Well I think I just heard the first apple drop.  It looks like I better wrap up all this canning and get ready to make cider!

Hay Now!

Ahh, the dog days of summer. When the mercury spikes at 97 and the humidity makes it feel like you are breathing through a wet blanket. Best to heed the advice of the radio dj's in their nice air conditioned studios as they advise you to stay inside and drink plenty of water. Good call buddy.


But then the call comes:
"Baling at noon"
"How many?"
"600"
" I'll take 250"

And hay season has begun. Hay is made when the sun shines....for at least three days....with no rain...and lots of heat. We used to bale our own hay but are  buying hay out of the field now. The old adage says "you lose money buying hay and you lose money making hay". Some day we'll find the right mix.

Away I go to gather bales. Hay is often sold one of four ways- in the field, off the wagon, out of the barn, and delivered (those are in order from cheapest to most expensive). Frugality being my faith, we get it from the field. When I am lucky I have help to drive the truck and we stack them on our flatbed trailer. When I am really lucky, the hay guy says he has some off the wagon for field prices. Park by the wagon and throw it on. Sweetness.

The fun isn't over yet though. You now need to put it into the hay mow. I'm not sure where the "mow" word came from but I have a suspicion that it is a combination of pained moaning and the word "OWW". While it is a frigid 97 outside, it is quite possibly 137 in the hay loft. Today Karen is feeding bales from the trailer to the hay elevator and as she suffers in the sun, I wonder if all the sweat pouring off of me like Niagara Falls would suffice as mineral for the sheep. The trailer has a pretty specific pattern I stack on. The hay mow is irregular in every way, and as such, starts with a great weave making the most of the space and sturdy all the way up till the second row when the flow of bales becomes faster than my cooked brain and they just get wadded into the voids, like a giant Jenga tower. Meanwhile, I am aware that farmers are much tougher than any coal miner Black Lung is nothing compared to Hay Lung.

Despite my complaints, I love haying. I've been doing it since I was 12 and any year I haven't done it I have missed it. There is no better smell than a barn full of fresh hay. And the satisfaction of knowing that no matter how bad the winter is, our animals will be fat and happy. Besides that, the health benefits are immense. I quit smoking the year that I was convinced I was the youngest person to ever have a heart attack while tossing bales. I drink plenty of fluids and the toning my body gets is better than any gym can offer. Always looking for a helper so feel free to let me know if you want that same great feeling.......

Gawkers

I was on the computer the other morning minding my own, when I heard someone lock up their brakes on our road. As a concerned citizen, I looked out the window to see a man jumping from his pick up to look at my neighbors cows. He then proceeded to take pictures of them. So I took a picture of him.

 

I'm curious what will become of those pictures. Does he get them printed up and hang them on his wall and dream of that great day when he saw cows in a  field? Now that the warm weather has returned, this is a common occurrence. We often have the motorcyclists who feel it necessary to yell "BAAAAA" at the top of their lungs as they drive past our sheep. Or the woman who pulled into our driveway and got into the pen with the lambs because they looked so cute-lucky for her the electric wasn't on, despite the sign saying it was. Part of me wished the ram had been in the pen and he would have shown her how cute he could be. I imagine this year will probably have more gawkers than usual.

 

  Hay is not cheap, and previously the rams have spent the summer lounging in the barn dining on it in excess quantities. I resolved last fall that we would be going with a low mow approach this year. The rams don't need large  areas, but do well on smaller plots that the ewes would have gone in hours. So, we have one ram who is working a rotation in the front lawn in three sections. and the other will be cleaning up in the area behind the barn and in front of the sugar shack. Keeping them out of visual distance of each other is also key because a battle could erupt were one able to get near the other. Initial experiments have been good on the front lawn although I have to put aside my dream manicured golf green in favor of a less uniform look as he grazes randomly from place to place, however the end result is not too bad and two hours not spent mowing each week sucking in exhaust fumes is okay with me.

We're Lambin', and I hope you like lambin' too

Well, It is 12:11 AM on a Friday nite and my wild time consists of making sure that some newborn lambs find their mothers teat for their first lifesaving meal. Karen finds it amusing that I stress out about lambing so much. In my defense, I am most concerned about the first time ewes, who like irresponsible teenage moms, step over their children to go see what is new with their friends. I worry about every stumbled step the newborn takes and why the mom isn't getting up right away and oh god please do not let her have twins because that means a whole Pandora's box of problems for me. Tonite is Holly, who (hopefully only) just had a lamb and looks like another is on the way. She is part of the new problem as the oldest ewe who now we have to worry about her having triplets again and will she make it through the whole process. She is a strong girl though and I think there is one more breeding season in her future. As always, she is laid back and ready for what comes her way.

Holly

It is a huge time of year though. It determines how much hay we need, what kind of pasture rotation we should plan, how many boys or girls, and most importantly, what color are the lambs! Icelandics are always a surprise as to what color may come out. We have bred black rams with black ewes and had white lambs and vice versa. Sometimes you get black and white, like our ewe Bessy who looks more like a Holstein cow than an Icelandic sheep-always a surprise.

We lamb late. Unfortunately this year it was very late. Some breeders have lambs in January-February so that by time the grass is gone, so are the lambs. Icelandics are a smaller heritage breed so they grow slow and they don't get very big. We would rather wait until April (or May in this case) when it is warmer and we can turn the lambs right on to fresh green grass with mom, because regardless, we will need to keep them over the winter and feed hay so they can get big enough to sell for the boys. The girls will get one year off to get bigger and then they will become moms too.

Ewes have a five month gestation period. We move the girls into the barn five months the day we turned the rams out with them. This is actually the most crowded time of year for inside space. The ewes are put into lambing jugs. These are small pens, most recommend 4'x4', but we usually make them larger and odd shaped to fit the space we have available. These give ewes no choice but to love on their babies. You can see from the pictures that pretty much every scrap piece of anything gets used as fence/barrier material for the jugs.

Let me out!

Well, Holly has had twins. A black girl and a white boy. Both have nursed from mom and she seems to be doing fine, despite Noel knocking over her water and flooding the jug. Hay and shaving added for bedding so she (and I) can go get some sleep.

Notice the obligatory bailing twine holding it all together.

Dirt Farmer

Long, long ago, when we were first starting our farm, Karen said she wanted a garden. Being an ardent carnivore, I promised help as far as it could be done from the seat of my tractor. As a child I grew to hate weeding with a passion and began to hate the gardens that produced them. So, we tilled a corner of the field, fenced it off with electric and planted everything under the sun. The only thing that came up was some raspberry shoots from my Great Grandmothers garden and those were quickly devoured when the sheep figured out that the power had gone out (I have a suspicion the goat had a hand in this). Karen was heartbroken but for me it just reaffirmed that gardens suck....time and money and energy from you.



Yeah...I did it. And the next time you plant I'll do it again.

Now, don't get me wrong, I would gladly have a fresh juicy whatever from my own garden than some pesticide laden junk from the supermarket. That has been the driving force behind most of our farm plans. But, I just never really enjoyed the garden much. We were also lucky to have a friend who grew an abundant garden that kept us fully stocked anyway. But, when we moved back to New Hampshire, other than some free zucchini, we were on our own. It is rumored that the only time people lock their cars here is when zucchini is in season because friends and neighbors will sneak in and dump a few bushels without your knowing. After a season with a regular garden where Karen came into her gardening prime, as well as years of fencing experience under our belts, we decided to make a garden that was user friendly. Enter our raised beds.



Just like that!

We decided to make our raised beds taller than normal. Advantages- you can sit on the sides comfortably so no bending over to weed. Also, deeper soil to grow in. Disadvantage--more lumber and more compost. We ended up doing 6 raised beds and were very pleased with the results. Some lessons that we have taken away are that spreaders like pumpkins, watermelon and squash should have their own area on the ground or a separate bed. We also keep horseradish, rhubarb, garlic and other recurring plants or overwintering plants in a traditional garden bed. If a really harsh winter hits, the beds don't retain heat because of their exposure. While I may not help much on the weeding, I do get into the spirit by planting seedling and watering- you know, Lazy farmer stuff.

Yummy!

Vet visit day

        One of the rituals of spring is to get all of the animals checked out by the vet before they start having babies. The vet checks them over and gives required shots. As you probably guessed, that requires rounding everyone up so that she can take a look, and as with most things for us, we have gotten better at this with time. Catching sheep and goats is more art than science. Our first attempts were aided by a smaller pen within the larger pasture where we could contain the animals and systematically run them down. This often resulted in terrified sheep and exhausted farmers. Our next upgrade was a chainlink dog kennel that we would put hay in and shut the door once we had gotten all of our patients cornered. It became this by default since Cody can somehow climb out of it if he feels like it. The biggest problem with this was that it is really heavy to move so if you have multiple animals in multiple locations, you were out of luck.

 The livestock trailer has become the standby method for catching animals. The main trick is to skip a meal before they need catching and then put the feed inside the trailer. This often works best with two people. Sheep are especially leery and it helps if you are slightly hidden while another person spots them all inside so you can shut the door. With one set of especially wily pigs, I sat on top of the trailer for hours until hunger got the better of them and they were convinced no one was around. They walked in and I slid the door shut behind them.

This time, since we were just catching them for shots. We used feedlot panels (A 16' rigid steel wire panel) to hold them in a small area and the vet administered shots and inspections through the fence.

Round up time!

One of my dreams is to have real handling equipment that we can funnel the sheep and goats through and by switching the gate one way or the next, everyone goes back to where they belong. As always, this is very attainable....if you have a grand or two to spare. One thing I did discover was that should we get any more cattle, we will need something better. Erica managed to throw our very pregnant vet back and me sideways when the first needle hit her. A full body hold against the tractor by Karen and I kind of worked but if she gets much bigger that probably won't be very effective.


Before the shots-I believed that cute look....

Long story short, everyone checked out with a clean bill of health. Best wishes to Dr. C expecting her first child. Her help is always a lifesaver (Literally!) for the farm.


Spring Cleaning

I apologize for my lack of postings recently. I would however, ask everyone to notice the title is not "Confessions of a Diligent Blogger". The syrup season is nearly complete! Actual, it is but one part remains----the dreaded clean up.

Some of the aftermath-each of those 5 gallon buckets has tubing in it also....

I resolved in January when I was cleaning with ice water trying to get ready for the sap I would have an orderly and efficient clean up time this year and by god I am trying to. The first thing is the tubing. As with many things in the maple community, there is some disagreement over cleaning. Some folks use bleach water, which others say attract rodents and leaves a poor taste in the lines. Some do not do any cleaning. I am of the flushing fresh water through the lines crowd, followed by compressed air and a drying period. To do this, I built a contraption that allows me hook the tubing up to our hose bib and force water through the tubing. I use a compressor to blow out the tube and then hang dry with a weight on the bottom to allow water to drain out. Once they dry, I will store them in a 55 gallon drum by tap amounts on the line.

 

 

As for the buckets. We scrub any debris or dirt out and then rinse with a water-bleach solution (20:1 is the recommended amount) and allow to air dry. Then they will be stacked and covered in the sugar shack. By far this is the most tedious part of the process but is key to making good syrup next year and saves money on having to buy new tubing and buckets each year.

With any luck this will be complete by tomorrow. Then the real fun starts with the cleaning of the evaporator. All the ashes get shoveled out and the grates are removed for cleaning. Then all the small parts are taken off and cleaned in the sink. The larger parts like the pans will be pressure washed and scrubbed. I am in the market for some covers to go over the top for the off season but most likely I will just store the pans upside down so they won't collect dust and debris. Now you can see how exciting things have been over the past week or so and why no postings. I'll spare you the fascinating story of getting our taxes done.....

 

 

In other news, the snow is mostly gone and cleanup of the winter mess has begun. Erica the calf is happy because she gets to spend her days out in the back field taking sun baths. The mini truck is back on the road and the heated buckets have all been put to bed. One season down, the next is just beginning. Soon we'll be shearing the sheep to get ready for lambs!

Squishy-Squishy-The mud is here.

Ahh, Spring. That beautiful time of year when everything is brown or snow colored like Wyatt after a dirt bath. As the white stuff recedes, we see all of the things that we didn't get done before the winter. Like all the hoses neatly coiled in a fine rats nest, only broken by the slashes courtesy of the plow. Or the shovel half buried that we have spent most of the winter looking for. It goes on and on, and as much as I enjoy a clean farm, I have to just ignore it as maple syrup calls and until all the snow is gone, it is a futile effort to pick away at the small stuff.

Do I have something in my teeth?

Maple season has been good so far. We have already made more than all of last year and production continues, at a slower pace due to weather that was too warm, which had the sap stop flowing and now it hasn't been getting warm enough during the day to make much of a run. I am enjoying the brief break though as a chance to catch up on bottling, labeling and delivering to customers. The warm-up was preceded by a marathon boiling session to ensure that none of the sap went bad and there is only one sure way to make that happen-turn it into syrup! Thanks to all the friends who came by to visit and partake in the New England tradition of watching the sanity of the sugar maker slowly disappear. It is entertaining for the guest but helps the sugar maker because no sane person would watch and think they should do that too, so competition stays low. Here is a picture of the operation in full flow for those who can't be here to watch.

To elaborate on the turkey fryer process a bit more and how our evaporator works. The big silver tank in the background is the feed tank. We pump from outside tanks into here with a filtering process to remove most things from the sap. This tank feeds a float box which controls the amount of sap in the syrup pan.

The flue pan, which sits in front of the tank in this picture, is where most of your evaporation takes place. It has small alleys or flues in the pan that make more of the sap in contact with the heat below.

After it has boiled in the flue pan, the smaller box to the left will control it's release into the syrup pan. The syrup pan is the shorter pan to the left where you get to making the finished syrup product, or in my case, close enough to finished but not in danger of burning and ruining a $1,000 dollar stainless syrup pan. I prefer to use, you guessed it, the good old turkey fryer to finish my syrup on, after filtering, because I can do large batches and easily control the heat since it is propane. Plus the pot is $45 which would sting but wouldn't cause a heart attack.

We are still refining the process but we are getting there. Construction wasn't fully complete when we started as you can tell from the scaffolding in the background. That will have to wait for the snow melt too.

Farmer Phils Big Winter Vacation.

For those who don’t know, we raise Icelandic sheep on our farm. The sheep were actually the first animals we got on the farm along with Mama the goat. Most sheep need to be sheared (get a hair cut) at least once a year. We shear twice, in the spring and in the fall, as the fleece quality is much better the more you cut it. It also makes lambing easier and the summer a little more bearable for the sheep.

 

Previously we have hired a professional shearer to come and do this for us. Not many people would look at the process and determine that it is easy. It takes a lot of strength, flexability and patience as you finagle a 175 lb. animal around with really sharp clippers that can cut both of you. All the while, they are attempting to get away not realizing the impending danger they are in. Despite this, I have been watching it for a number of years now and really wanted to learn how to do it myself. Enter my big vacation to the Cornell University shearing school this past weekend.

The shearing school was a two day course at the Cornell sheep farm in Dryden, NY. It teaches the basics of shearing while giving you a hands on experience handling all types of sheep. (No major injuries to report to student or sheep).  Shearing has been fine tuned over the centuries to a standardized pattern of cuts that are used across all breeds of sheep. The process we were being taught was perfected in New Zealand in the 50’s . It breaks down the shearing in simple, easy to follow steps, which as with most things, look great on paper.

 

 

He doesn't appear to be in pain or yelling expletives and that sheep is holding still - based on recent experiences, I am calling Shenanigans...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 After getting a few demonstrations, we began shearing. We would then get some more demonstration and shear some more sheep. It really was a hands on learning process because no sheep will react the same way and each step takes a few times to feel comfortable with. By the end of the day on Sunday I can claim that I sheared 11 sheep. I will probably be practicing on our lambs as a refresher for when we do the full flock. I'll try and go a little further into the process then.  As one instructor put it best “ sometimes whatever gets it done is the best method”and I think that sums it up. All in all a great class, where I got to meet some great people and learn something new-all the elements of a good trip in my book.

I did attempt to have a guest blogger tell the story of how our horse earned the name of Houdini while I was gone but she was still traumatized from the event, but I am sure we can get her to tell the tale soon.

The good kind of collection agency

 

Collecting sap - Nothing really technical here. Go in the woods and get the sap. Bring sap back to the truck and bring to the sugar shack. One key thing is to ensure the tank in your truck is tied down, otherwise it will come flying out the back and you will spill 35 gallons on Sandown Rd. Trust me. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap from a sugar maple to make one gallon of syrup. A red and silver maple are about double that because the sugar content is about half. We tap mostly sugar maples however we do have a few red maples mixed in.

 

Happier times when the tank was in the truck

 

Once back to your farm, you can begin to boil. There are a million methods to perform this step but the process itself is basically the same. We’ll be using a turkey fryer as our example here as most people have one and our first question on the blog was about this method. When I first started making syrup as a lad, we typically just set a pot on the woodstove and waited. One major drawback to this method is that it takes a really, really long time and if both you and your father fall asleep, the syrup will become sugar and then burnt sugar and will wake you both up to a smoky living room. We started out our modern operation with a turkey fryer.Most newer burners have kill switches that need to be pressed every 15 minutes or the gas will be shut off, thus avoiding the above mishap. The other advantage is that you are outside so the copious amounts of moisture that is released into the air, versus the kitchen which can peel wallpaper and ruin drywall. Never a good thing.

This turkey fryer works well if you only have a few taps and really don’t feel like spending $1000 plus on a small evaporator. With a turkey fryer, use the pan and fill it about 2/3 full. Once you light the burner, you leave the lid on until you get a boil going and then remove the lid. Use some sort of visual mark in the pan-mine had a scratch that was fortunately at the correct height and slowly add sap to the pot as it boils down. Once you have put all your sap in, you will boil it down. Through the process, you will notice the contents of the pot getting darker-that means you are getting closer.  Aside from the darkening, you will get a few indicators that you are getting close. The bubbles in the boil will suddenly get very small and very active.

 

 

At this point you want to take a spoon and dip it in. If the syrup drips of like water, you have a while longer to go. If it hangs as a drip at the end that is similar to well, cough syrup, You are set. This is the method most old time syrup makers used and still do today. It takes some practice to master this method so we cheat and use a Hydrometer. I’ll cover that another time.

 

A couple of points about sap. It is similar to milk in the way you should handle it. If you leave sap unprocessed and un-cooled, it will start to get a cloudy residue that looks like boogers. DO NOT use that. It can ruin a whole batch. The best plan is to collect every day and process it that day. We store our sap on the north end of the sugar shack where it never gets any sun. This allows it to stay cool so that we can wait a day or two to boil, but if you are using a turkey fryer, do it right away.
That is it for syrup for now. It's all we'll be doing for the next four weeks so a new topic awaits the next post. Stand by...

Some Maple Buckets Look Better on Postcards

 

After getting some necessary modifications to the sugar shack complete, we started step one of the maple syrup odyssey – tapping the trees (Adventure? Epic? Quest? Tragedy?...I guess we’ll know at the end of the season) . As the lazy farmer, I am constantly trying to upgrade and this is a brief recap of how we have arrived at our current method.

As a young lad tapping the trees of the great New Hampshire forests, we were frugal in the truest sense of the word. The sugar bush consisted of four trees and my dad had picked up a couple taps along the way. Our bucket consisted of milk jugs with modified holes for the purpose. The following image is a recreation as we weren’t particularly proud of our method and never took pictures of it.

 

 

With enough attention to detail, you can usually get all hints of milk taste out of the jug and be making a decent sap collector-except for the fact you can only hold ¾ of a gallon. I was collecting in the morning, as soon as I got off the bus and once again at nite if it was really running. Not ideal if you have more than 10 taps.

Now, everyone has seen the steel grey buckets that hang from the trees. These are generally 3 gallons and are galvanized. The main drawback to many of those is that lead solder may have been used on them and they have the potential to release lead into the sap. A low chance but still there. We skipped right over those and tried the modern equivalent:

 

 

The one on the left is aluminum and the right is plastic. Both are lead free. I would love to claim that we were fully researching both mediums for sap retention and tried both for science but the truth was, we bought a bunch of the plastic ones (the main advantage being that you can see the sap level without lifting the lid). As we found more trees, we ran out of buckets and the local hardware store only had aluminum buckets in stock. Both are three gallons also. We still use these in front of the farm as an advertising tool and because we have them so they are going to get used.

Enter the lazy frugal farmer and our current preferred setup:

 

 

That is a 5 gallon food grade bucket with tubing. The bucket cost $3.45 ea for lots of 5 at Lowes and it’s $1.98 for the lid. The plastic maple bucket is $8.50 and the lid is $3.50. I leave the math to you. The tube spout is smaller and better for the tree (and much cheaper than the traditional tap $.39 vs.$ 2.25. If you use a tee connection, you can have one tube going into the side of the bucket and it keeps out dust, rain/snow and ill-intentioned teenagers.  The five gallon bucket also comes with a handle to carry it back to the truck. We run this with a large portion of our taps. This year, we are looking to do a slightly larger version, with a few trees gravity feeding into a 55 gallon drum, and we pump it out to the truck. Pictures to follow. The main reason we haven’t done this is that people are doing us a favor by allowing us to tap their trees- we don’t want to return that favor by having them clothesline themselves on tubing as they walk or snowmobile through the woods:

 

 

That is what we have been up to for this week. Hoping to have all taps in by tomorrow in time for a foot of snow this weekend- perhaps the next topic will be search and rescue techniques for lost sap buckets. We did receive our first question from our friend Eric in Upstate NY :

“What can you tell me about boiling maple sap in a turkey fryer?”

As luck would have it, that will in be my next post so stay tuned…

Confessions of a Lazy Farmer-Is this called the pilot ?

Well, I suppose I should confess at the beginning that I am not in fact a lazy farmer, despite the title of this blog. That being said, it is my life long dream to become one. I dream of a farm where I awake at a leisurely hour and pull a lever to feed everyone and pull a switch to water them. The eggs are all in a nice pile waiting to go by the roadside stand and the syrup is sitting in the pan waiting for a fire. Hay simply sits waiting to be put on the elevator and ascends into the barn to fall in nice neat stacks. This dream is like many other dreams-very attainable, if you win the lottery, which I have not done. But, till that day, I will try and apply Yankee ingenuity and non-standard ideas to our farm in an attempt to find the shortest way to the bathroom, at the lowest price. If they are successful, I will pass them along, as well as  any stories of farm fun , past and present.  I will also tell you about the failures, since those seem to be the ones that everyone likes. I welcome any comments, questions and ideas along the way.

Spoiler Alert: Today we will be getting the evaporator set up for boiling sap in our new sugar shack. Moving a 1400 lb hunk of iron and brick with my wife is always a bonding experience. Full report to follow...

Farmer Phil is now online, ready to answer your questions and give you more insight into the life and work happening here at Coombs Farm!