Rae lives and farms on Barr Farms with her family. She loves cooking healthy food, trying new things, deep conversations with friends, reading, learning, and playing, especially with her three children.
It's our first year making maple syrup. We partnered with a young Mennonite boy to tap trees, and we're using our sorghum cooking pan to cook it. We've collected four batches of sap now. We collected yesterday and got 180 gallons of sap. The run before that we got 210 gallons! That 210 gallons made about 5 gallons of syrup.
It's a long process, but the syrup is delicious! We've only given some away as gifts so far, and Adam's aunt said, "this is the best syrup I've ever poured on my pancakes!" We think it's awfully good, too. It's really fun to add half-cooked sap into your tea or coffee.
The first 120 gallons of sap we collected just before the January cold spell. When we tried to transfer it to the cooking pan the next day when the temp had plummeted, the valve broke, maybe because it was frozen, and all the sap spilled onto the ground! It took us about a half a day to recover emotionally, but we finally started to think of it as an offering to the Earth. Round 2 went well, when we figured out fire temperature, cooking process, when it was done, and how to finish it off. We made a great batch of syrup! Round 3 in progress now! Now we need to keep making a few more batches and figure out how to bottle and label it so you can enjoy some too!
