#yardening

[losech]

Flowers around the yard

[losech]

Yardening. Stuff is starting to take off.

[losech]

First homemade maple syrup is done. It's light and has a delicious butterscotch flavor, not like store bought syrup at all. I got just over one pint from about five gallons of sap.

I did the bulk of the boil outside on James then brought it inside and finished on the stove. Filtered and bottled in a pint jar, the leftover went into a little jar in the fridge.

[losech]

Yardening

Got a lot of stuff leafing out, setting flowers, and popping up. These warm temps are really getting stuff going. Hopefully the freeze that's coming up won't do too much damage.

[losech]

Yardening

There was an explosion of growth while I was gone. I set up the last two trellises (one arch and one tomato set), put the potatoes in, and had to modify my plant shelf inside to accommodate my insane tomatoes.

[losech]

I went to a couple maple syrup supply stores to get some bottles and a few things to modify James, one of them had these really nifty half leaf bottles. I got a case of the small bottles to keep a little bit of each boil to track the color as the season progresses.

There's a variety of bottle styles available, I got regular syrup bottles for most of the syrup. For specialty bottles I usually see full leaf, but I really liked the half leaf.

[losech]

Since I can't ever just dip my toes into a hobby... Step one of my next project complete.

This barrel stove will eventually be a sap evaporator. Once the paint is fully burnt and brushed off I'm going to coat it with high heat paint and cut two big holes in the top for a pair of large pans that will boil and concentrate maple sap into maple syrup. Today's burn was just a test to see if I did it right. I'm going to put it up on blocks to get it away from the grass once I start boiling sap.

This was actually my second attempt (and barrel) at building a diy evaporator. The first one was Thomas the tar fueled jet train.

[losech]

Will I ever have enough hobbies?

No.