Setting the trees (continued) ...

You didn't think it could all be done in one day, did you?! This process is work, particularly when half of you have the usual farm chores to do anyway, and the other half of you stayed up too late watching bad movies. This post is late, but refers to Sunday, February 22, a.k.a. the day after the last entry.

That day dawned not-quite-as-brightly as the previous one (not that any of us, except perhaps Margie and Ed, are very knowledgeable about what dawn looks like). After a little milling around doing I'm not sure exactly what, we set off to the orchard eager, ready, and excited to set buckets! Well, at least ready. The initial crew was Ed, Ethan, and Lee on the tractor, and Rachel following along on the fatbike (no, I don't get a commission, I just love this bike):

Luckily for today's blog fodder, I missed a crucial step in yesterday's sugaring entry. Or at least I missed posting a photo about it, which effectively means it didn't happen. The observant among you will have noticed that we moved seamlessly from drilling holes to hanging buckets, with barely a mention of the intermediate tap, or "spigot". Today, we can redeem that with a picture (left) of all three stages in action at once (the fourth stage, the wrestling of the lids, you know about already).

The only misleading aspect of this picture is that Ed (driller) and Lee (spigot-inserter, and here multi-tasking on his cell phone) were actually very fast, leaving us bucket-hangers, lid-placers, and sometime tractor-and-fatbike-movers to be racing after them frantically, rather than waiting alongside in the cool pose Ethan assumes here.

The fact that there's still a lot of snow out here, not to mention snow made soft by the relatively warm temperatures, made this task quite hard work, as every step becomes something of a trudge. As you can see, the buckets originally appeared quite daunting:

Over several hours, we made a good dent in this load (not a literal dent), though we couldn't find quite enough trees to hang them all. Still, at the end of the weekend we had set around 1200 buckets, which is a lot of trips through the snow!

Around noon, Lee got a super-urgent call on his cell phone, as he is a is on the list of snow plowers (I don't know exactly what list, but the list). I think at that point approximately two flakes of snow had fallen, so nobody can say that those in the know for western Mass. snow-plowing are sleeping at the wheel! Lee was dispatched for immediate duty, but luckily for us his replacement Kate had shown up by that time, so we were not short-handed. The snow flakes continued to fall, and it was a wet, heavy snow. But we persevered. Between us, Kate and I had one good pair of boots and one half-way good pair of gloves, so we were getting cold. Soon after this, however, Ed pronounced us done. He then proceeded to start arranging logs for a bonfire. I thought this a crazy idea, when we could simply get back as fast as possible, get changed and warm up indoors. Plus, everything was wet, so I didn't like the fire's chances. However, I was soon proved wrong, as Ed got a good blaze going. And that blaze was really warm! Here are the after pictures: hot-dogs over a roaring fire (unless you're vegetarian, when you eat egg sandwiches (thanks Margie and Ethan!) and take pictures). And I think you'll agree that the orchard looks beautiful (well ok, this is the day before, when the sun was actually shining).

Now, we just have to hope for the sap to run!

Maple: Setting up the buckets

Here's where we show-and-tell all the hard work that goes behind that delicious maple syrup you pour over your pancakes! We're hoping for a great maple harvest this year, last year's was a bumper, and hopefully nature will repeat herself. In any event, the action is about to begin. March is maple month. In this area, that's when you typically get the freeze-thaw cycle you need for the sap to run. But before all that, before the sap is even dripping, you have to set the buckets. At least if you're old school like us. So that's what we did today.

First, you find somebody handy with a drill to make a hole in a
good-sized tree. That's Ed's specialty:


Next, you insert a small tap into the drilled hole, and hang a bucket from it. That may sound pretty easy, but bear in mind that you have to carry a whole pile of buckets to follow your driller, they're solid and they're heavy. Plus, you have to carry them in snow.
Luckily, Ethan was up to the task:
(He does in fact have a whole head.
You can blame the photographer.)

Last comes the thankless task of placing the lids on the things. This was my job. They didn't all fit well. Some slide on smoothly--very exciting when you get one of those--others you have to wrestle with and force on like a pair of jeans that used to fit before the holidays came and you gained 5 lbs. You can see how excited I was about it:


In all honesty, though, Ethan and I didn't do much of this. Like the city slickers we are, we didn't roll out of Boston that early, and showed up to this task around 3 p.m, when a lot had been done already. We took Kate and Margie's spots; they did most of the hard work.

Sometimes, when you're out there in the snow, you're
gonna need a fatbike:



That's it for now, we'll be back out to finish the orchard tomorrow!

Welcome to our blog!

This is the inaugural post of the Mayval Farm blogspot. As you know from our main website, we're a small Massachusetts dairy farm. We have 200 cows, approximately 100 of which we milk. We also have some other smaller ventures: maple sugaring and composting are well-established, and we're looking into other possibilities such as raw milk, garden produce (we regularly have some in season items for sale and may look to expand this in the future). Please leave us feedback if there are things you'd like to see! We've started this blog particularly to share our experiences this sugaring season with you, but we hope to continue it as a window into the whole experience of small-time farming. Welcome and enjoy!

(Note that we're also new to this blogging thing, so hopefully these posts will get increasingly more sophisticated!)