Last week we had some freakishly heavy winds — rolling through at well over 75pmh!
Heavy winds are not uncommon, however, the heaviest ones typically happen in April.
And, while this isn’t actually part of the memoir, this happened months later that same proceeding year.
So, we’ll call this:
“MEMORY MONDAY!”
After we moved into our doublewide house, we ended-up with about a dozen or so rubber maid bins left-over from storage.
Eager to jump right into doing something productive with the land, Erik announced we’d be tapping maple trees. He’d done it as a kid for fun, how hard could it be?
He already knew there were several massive maple trees on the property. We’d collect the sap into the large plastic bins, then cook it down at the end of the season.
We drove to Family, Farm and Home and gathered 12 taps, plus a book on how to make it, “How to Tap My Trees”. We bought plastic tubing to fit over the taps, and ran the lines down into the large plastic bins.
For several weeks, we let them collect sap.
Finally on April 12, 2014 the weather suddenly warmed and Erik knew the season was done (plus the sap would rot). We decided that Saturday to cook it all down into syrup.
Erik had decided to make a massive cooker pan out of a metal barrel cut length-wise. The barrel had a coating on the inside, I was skeptical about that. Erik argued that it would be fine. I argued it’d come-off in the fire! He tried buffing/sanding it out, but this seemed to make the barrel worse.
It was Earen’s 1yr old birthday, and Erik’s Dad suddenly called us up wanting to go out for his birthday. We figured we’d be done cooking syrup by that evening, so we agreed.
We cooked the sap alllll day!
I don’t remember how many gallons of sap we had, maybe 45?
Finally it was getting close, so we kept checking the temperature. It refused to push past 217. It was 6pm and we had to leave. They were forecasting rain later, so Erik took the other barrel half and partially covered the syrup cooker half.
And we loaded-up the fire and left it to cook.
While we were busy eating, our neighbor called to let us know she had our dogs.
Our dogs?
Apparently a freak storm had run through the few hours we were gone and tore everything apart — or at least the dog kennel.
We quickly rushed home, mad that we had left in the first place. We didn’t know what to expect when we got home, but the very least a ruined dog kennel and our syrup dumped-over.
Strangely enough, when we pulled-up the driveway, the first thing we noticed was the FIRE STILL BURNING and the syrup UNTOUCHED.
The wind was still gusting and rain was pelting us in sheets, so we quickly dumped the syrup into a giant stock pot to finish-up inside.
We cooked it to 219 and ran it through filters into mason jars. It tasted pretty good! I had never really had real maple syrup before, but when I tasted this stuff I was amazed!
We ended-up having some major property damage. Our soft-sided round top had been torn out of the ground and tossed into a mangled heavy several yards away. Everything inside either tossed into the neighbor’s field or soaking-wet. Erik’s 1,000lb lawnmower was flipped onto it’s side . . . but the empty plastic 300 gallon water tanks sat un-phased.
The camper had been turned slightly (that’s 12,000 lbs), the dog kennel blown wide open, and the pigeon coop (300+ lbs) had been PICKED-UP and THROWN 75 feet.
My pigeons were loose everywhere.
We managed to flip the cage back-up and drag it back by the dog kennel (or it’s flip over again in the heavy winds) and I called the pigeons down and they happily dove back into the safety of their house.
We were still finding scattered debris many months later.
As for the syrup? Well, despite the filtering, it still ended-up with at least in inch of junk in the bottom. A mix of maple niter, and primer paint from the barrels.
I’m pretty sure the stuff is toxic. I have one jar left of it as proof of our experience. But despite the yucky stuff in the bottoms, we were hooked on maple syrup, and each year continue to improve our craft and make the best syrup possible!
And now it’s crystal clear!
