Sweet Maple Goodness

I needed a little project this winter/spring to keep me out of trouble.  Something productive, fun, and sweet.  Since my friend Rixa taps her maple tree for syrup, I figured I could, too.  Not her maple of course, mine!  So with some info from Rixa,  and spiles from tapmytrees.com (I know, isn't that the greatest url ever?) I'm on my way to making maple syrup.

Here's the 411.  I drilled a hole in the tree about 3 feet from the ground.  Rixa said to angle the hole down.  Which makes sense and I'm glad she told me to because I'm sure I wouldn't have. 

 

The kids and I jammed the tap in with a mallet.  Rixa gave me some tubing that connects from the spout and into a gallon jug. 

 

I bought the spiles and not the buckets because I'm way too cheap.  The tubing gets the sap into the jug and hopefully keeps all critters out. 

So far I've gotten a quart of sap which boiled down to about 3 tablespoons of syrup.  Not impressive, yet.  But those three tablespoons are the best maple syrup I've ever tried!  I need to ask our neighbor if I can tap their tree in which case we will be swimming in sap.  Not so much syrup, but that's ok.

An Iris for My Pocket

I picked up this handkerchief at the same thriftstore I got the sweaters at.  I'm not sure what I will use it for.  Probably a handkerchief.  It's tissue thin and worn in a few spots, but I loved the irises which reminded me of our community garden in Irvine.  The garden was bulldozed yesterday to make way for more housing, so it will be good to have a piece of it in my pocket.

In My Pretty Garden

A shot J took Sunday morning. Early. His ride comes at 6:15. I don't know if this is our last snow, but this morning I did see the daffodils poking up maybe an inch. I bought a big bag of bulbs last fall and planted them in front of our house. I've loved spring flowers since our first spring in Utah when we realized that the previous owners had planted hundreds of tulips in front of our house. I thought it might be nice to give the next occupants a similar gift. Maybe this will be my "Bekah Wuz Here" tag I leave until we settle somewhere.

Volunteer

If you pass by my house, you might see these awesome volunteer tomatoes. You can't tell that well in the photo, but there are three of them.

The soil is super rich there, as that's where the sewage overflow outlet is. And we've had three backups since Christmas.

So here's the question. Just what kind of tomatoes will they be? We favor cluster tomatoes, but what do the neighbors fancy?

I wish we were going to be here to find out.

Spring is here

In orange county, at least. My car smells like poo, which is good and bad. It means I bought steer manure to begin prepping the soil. But it also means that it's still in my car on a warm spring day. I'm waiting for my backup so I can haul it to the garden. While getting the poo, I picked up some lovely flowers and planted them around my patio. Miriam designed and planted one of the pots.

I also picked up some alyssum so I can do some stealth gardening tomorrow am. Alyssum is very hardy and bunnies detest it. It also spreads quite a bit. These wonderful attributes make it ideal for stealth landscaping. I'm very excited because it feels so illicit.

I planted a window box with mesclun mix and it has started to sprout. There is so much hope and anticipation in gardening. It feeds my creative spirit. I'm looking forward to planting an herb garden for my mother in law this summer.