Sugaring

No matter what the calender say, spring starts in Vermont with two things: seeds and sugaring. The seeds are planted in flats, protected from drafts, put under lights and carefully nurtured. The sugaring requires a drill, some buckets and lots of time.

I love sugaring. There's something really pleasant and contemplative about watching water boil and turn into liquid heaven. The only reason to make pancakes to me, is that they are a maple syrup delivery device.

The sap buckets sprout on the trees long before the snowdrops, but the weather has turned. Even if we get a cold snap now, we are aware that it will only last a day or two. The snow has taken on the specific texture that skiers say they enjoy and I warn the kids not to make snowballs of to hit their father.

Winter is shrouded in silence or it roars with wind. Spring announces itself with song, even before the birds return. In the sugar bush the sap drips into the galvanized steel buckets creating a high pitched musical plink.  A dozen of these on a sunny day sounds like a couple of people riffing on high pitched steel drums. The base line is provided by the stream that is a chuckling  then a roaring as the ice breaks up.

We have snow on the ground up here in the mountains, but it's mostly gone on the valley floor.

My neighbors for whom sugaring is a commercial exercise are up and down the street with their tractor and our grey muzzled dogs play together, running up and down the trails.

Maple sugar is a wonderful thing. It is the only form of sugar that does not lend itself to the Plantation System. A sugar  bush can only be tapped for about 6 weeks out of the year. The rest of the year the maples just grow happily in their forest with only minimal help and protection from humans.

Sugar Maples are only found in North America. From Cornell University:

Distribution and Habitat: Sugar maple is one of 148 maple species found in the Northern Hemisphere, which includes about 90 native and introduced species in the United States. The range of sugar maple in North America extends from Nova Scotia and Quebec at its northern edge, west to Ontario, southeastern Manitoba, and western Minnesota, south to southern Missouri, and east to Tennessee and northern Georgia (Figure 2). Sugar maple is most common in New England and the Great Lakes states as well as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Yes, it is expensive, and likely to get more so. Due to the recent warm winters, the season has been growing shorter, especially for the valleys.

Sugar maples can be grown in other places, but they will not yield sap without the specific weather available in these specific parts of North America. Thomas Jefferson apparently tried to sugar in Virginia, to no avail. In order for tapping to happen, there must be warm sunny days and freezing nights.

Maple syrup can be boiled down into dry sugar and stored almost indefinitely  The chief component is sucrose (like table sugar), with very little fructose, which is being implicated as a culprit in obesity.

There are no GMO maple trees (yet) and since the trees are North American, there's no need to look for the free trade label.

Soon, the snow will be gone and we'll be into the planting part of the spring, until then, I'll be busy watching water boil.

Life with part-time electricity

What would it be like to live with eight hours of electrical power per day, in a first world country?
John Robb is thinking about it, especially in terms of national decline and collapse scenarios.

What would it mean for us, up on our little mountain?

So much of our life, even the way we homestead, is based on steady access to electricity.  Our water supply is a well, and its pump draws on household current.  Electrical light is crucial to doing work and being relatively sane during our long, dark winters.  And so many appliances require Edison's trickle: the clotheswasher, the refrigerator, and of course the modern world of digital communications: laptops, modems, X-box, etc.

One hopes that the eight hours of electricity are predictable and they coincide with the evening need for electricity. Say 3:00 PM until 11:00PM or 4:00 until Midnight. This way, the dark days of autumn and winter wouldn't become completely intolerable.

A brief peek into an unspecified future, as imagined by Ceredwyn:

So, winter: Electricity turns on in the afternoon, after the kids come back from school. Which is good, because it gets dark at 4:00. Husband has been running his computer (and the all important Internet connection) from battery power. The batteries were the best we could afford, deep cycle marine batteries that charge on a small solar panel. Failing that, we charge the Lithium batteries on our devices from the wall sockets at 4:00.

The gas stove usually works without electricity, but the oven does not, because it has an electric ignition. If we want to bake, now's the time.

It's also the time for showers and filling up our water containers. Fortunately for us, our septic is downslope from the house, thus we only have to pour greywater into the toilet to flush it. If the septic required an electric pump, we'd have quite a predicament.

We heat with wood, so we're pretty cozy. It's tough for the neighbors who have electric or gas heat. They both require electricity to run.  The fire dept has more alarms these days for people using makeshift heat sources.

The refrigerator gets plugged in, the melted snow that's been keeping it cold gets replaced. Of course, the food that needs to be frozen is in a locked freezer out back, packed with snow.

With the power being off 16 hours out of 24, I'm more inclined to can things than freeze them, and, of course, there's the stuff in the root cellar. Not telling you where we built that, it's well covered to discourage the casual thief.

In the evening, we indulge ourselves in those 20th Century pleasures, movies, music that we don't make ourselves or video games. The lights also make reading much easier. We power up whatever devices have rechargeable batteries.

Clothes are washed in the washer and hung to dry. Dishes for the day are done, no leaving anything for the next morning.

11:00 comes all too soon, and there's no real point to staying up once the power's off.

Summer's a little different because we don't rely so much on the electric lightbulb. There's also the fridge and freezers to consider. Basically, we use the freezer and fridge like one might use an ice box. When the electric comes on, we put the cold packs (We have quite a few large ones, we used to use for camping) in the freezer to freeze. Before bed, we put them back in the fridge.

Bedtime is when the electric shuts off. The electricity turns on at 3, the hottest part of the day, and shuts down at 10:00.

This is when living up north in a rural area pays off, our house doesn't need much in the way of air conditioning. We also moved our bedroom to the basement from the top floor. I'd like to install a sleeping porch if we ever get the money.

If one is lucky, one has some sort of solar panel or wind power set up. This can often supply electricity for the 16 hours of the day when the grid is off, but solar and wind are both prohibitively expensive to get started. One can also use gasoline generators, but again, very expensive, especially if the gas is expensive.

Expense is a problem in another way; the electricity we do get isn't  $0.11/KWh anymore. And it just keeps going up.

Venus Cloacina

Goddess of the Sewer

Just finished putting in all my flower bulbs.  It's amazing that it's the first week of December and we still can, but it is a bit of luck for me (Ceredwyn).

At left you see the little statue I've added to the garden.  Hopefully, in the spring the bulbs and wildflowers seeds I've planted will come up around her.  She will also hold a butterfly/hummingbird feeder when the weather is again freezing.

She is my Venus Cloacina, Goddess of the Sewer.  The Romans were very sensible people and did, in fact, have a shrine to this deity right in the middle of Rome.  They said the Health of Rome depended upon her.

Hummingbirds and flowers are especially sacred to Her, according to the Wikipedia entry.

So, right over our new leach field, we have a small statue of Her, 'cause it just seems like a good idea.

Rise of corn

Success: the corn continued to flourish, despite hurricane Irene.

Yes, those plants are much taller than me.

The plants are audacious things, huge spears poking up despite torrents and winds.  It's an eerie, sweet experience to walk among plants taller than yourself, and only a couple of months old.

A couple of months, and these fast-growing types are ready to harvest.  Notice the way the ears lean out, in the picture up above?  Time to pluck.

We won 2-3 ears/plant this time.  Each was about 5-6" long -not so big as grocery-store-bought ones.  Boiled up, they were excellent.

So, Ceredwyn and I are strategizing, with friends.  It seems like we can grow corn* up here on the mountain. How to proceed?
(Well, immediately we turn the green leaves to compost, and feed the husks to chickens.  Eat some of the corn, and freeze the rest)

Perhaps we should build a much larger plot for next year.  At 2-3 ears/plant, how many should we plan to sow?  Let's do some rough calculation.

1. Assume we four people eat five ears per day, cooked and consumed in various ways.  Some days we eat more, some less. That's 1825 ears per year.
2. Assume we can store corn sufficiently for a year (frozen, canned).
3. Looks like 730 plants are called for, total.
4. We now know that a grid pattern is essential for planting, so that plants cross-fertilize to maximum growth.  Assume a square layout - 27 x 27 plants.

If that's right, we need to start clearing extra space now, before the frost locks up the soil.

If we do this the right way, it's another step towards sustainability.  Corn's excellent food, and all four of us eat it (amazingly).

*Corn: I'm talking about sweet corn.  Field corn is a different thing, and we haven't tried it yet.  I'd like to, so we can mill it into corn meal.