One Season Ends, Another Begins

As the maple syrup season dries up, the next season begins:  we’re gearing up to garden.  Friday we hauled in three loads of alpaca manure from our friends at Foggy Bottom Farms, just up the road.  Saturday found us running circles around the garden with the tractor, using the blade in the back to spread nutrient-rich fertilizer evenly around the whole garden, sort of like an alpaca poop Zamboni.  Normally, we’d let the manure mellow on the ground and compost for a few weeks, until we were sure we’d seen the last of the snow & freezing temperatures.  But having missed out on the bulk of the maple syrup season this year, we are taking no chances with the garden.  So today we put the main irrigation line in place and hooked up our first twelve rows of drip tape.  Then today, March 18, we started planting the garden.  Did we mention that it’s March 18 in Minnesota, and we’re planting?  But it was also 80 degrees today, so we decided to be optimistic and plant most of our cold-weather, early-season crops:  two rows of spinach, two of radishes, two of leaf lettuce and one of iceberg lettuce. 

We’re also experimenting with two rows of onion seeds this year, since the frost is out of the ground so early.  Normally we buy small onion plants which have been grown from seed in a greenhouse.  We could also buy onion “sets,” which are small onion bulbs that were produced last growing season; sets are cheaper, but the onions don’t grow as big.  Onions respond to the change in daylight and completely stop growing when the days start getting shorter.  So plants give us a jump on the short onion growing season.  We’ve already ordered ours for the year, so if our little seed experiment doesn’t work, we won’t be crying about it.  At least not until we dice up our first pungent fully-grown onion! 

We're Boiling, But Just Barely

Today was the first maple syrup boil of our maple syrup season.  And likely the last.  At least it was a vigorous, rolling boil!  Murphy’s Law of Agriculture, Kopp Corollary:  “In the first year that your operation has a waiting list of maple syrup customers, the weather will take a turn for the wacky and dry up production. Literally and nearly completely.”

It’s not the dry winter that has thwarted our season.  If anything, the lack of moisture this winter should have resulted in sap with less liquid and a higher concentration of sugar, making it faster to boil.  No, it was the temperature that did us in.  When the days are above freezing, the sap rises up the trunk of the tree.  Freezing nights drive it back down to the roots.  Like it’s riding a little temperature-controlled sap elevator.  But if the nights aren’t cool enough, the sap stays up in the branches, and the “run” is over until next season.  Please note the weather report in Minnesota for the upcoming week:  highs in the sixties & seventies, lows well above freezing.  Bye, bye sap…have fun in the tree tops!  There's a small chance that the snow cover and shade deeper in the woods is keeping temperatures low enough to delay the sap run.  We might eke out a few more gallons.  But we’re not holding our breath.

Of course, this doesn’t explain why we’ve only collected a paltry 30 gallons of sap (that is, less than a gallon of syrup) in the past week, when the forecast should have been perfect for vertical sap travel.  Our hypothesis is that the syrup actually started moving during the unseasonably warm week we had in February, and stayed up in the branches.  And to think, we came this close to tapping our trees that week.  But ultimately we decided that February was too early to tap.  Now, does anybody know where we can pick up a meteorological crystal ball for next syrup season? 

Bye, Bye Bacteria

The syrup season is underway, but only after a great deal of careful preparation.  After the sugar shack construction, our next chore was to banish the bacteria from our equipment.  Now, before you let loose with an “ewwww… gross,” let’s be clear.  Our maple sap boils at 212 degrees for a minimum of 5 hours, and then the syrup finishes at 219 degrees.  So any bacteria that sneak into the sap are long gone by the time we bottle up our liquid gold. 

Besides, the bacteria we’re fighting isn’t harmful to people.  However, it is hungry. Ravenously hungry.  The bacteria eat up some of the precious sugar in the sap, and there’s a surprisingly low level of sugar in maple sap to begin with.  It doesn’t even taste sweet, straight out of the tree.  Which is why the normal ratio of sap to syrup is 40 to 1: forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.  But a batch that’s fallen victim to hungry, sugar-slurping bacteria will take even more sap to create the same amount of syrup.  So it behooves us to be diligent in the cleanliness of our equipment.  We boiled all our aluminum taps for several minutes on the kitchen stove, a technique perfected over the past few years of sanitizing new baby bottles & pacifiers.  Then our buckets all got a bath in bleach to ensure squeaky-cleanness… all one hundred of them.  Wash.  Rinse. Rinse again.  Third rinse is a charm.  Repeat ninety-nine times.  Collapse.

Tap, Tap, Tap… The Sound of the Start of the Syrup Season

Tap, tap, tap… the sound of impatiently drumming fingers on the table as we wait for the right time to tap the trees.  Tap too early, and the tap holes might close up before the peak of the sap run.  Tap too late, and the season is over before it even gets started.

Tap, tap, tap… the sound of a test run of the new boiling stove setup.  You can’t really call it a “dry” run, but maybe a “sugar free” one.  We fired up the stove to make sure the flame was efficient and that the stove would boil hot enough.  Then we loaded water into the sap storage tank to test the flow into the boiling pan.  Tap, tssss, tap, tssss… the sizzle of water hitting a hot boiling pan.  But when we lowered the hood onto the pan to check for a snug fit, we discovered that one corner of the stove had sunk a little.  Tap, tap, tap…wedging a wooden shim under the northeast corner of the stove, to once again make it nice & level so the sap boils evenly.

Tap, tap, tap… yesterday’s sound of taps being hammered into the south (sunny) side of 100 trees in the Kopp’s Crops woods.  Well, technically it started with a “whirrrrr”, as we drilled inch-and-a-half-deep holes into the tree trunks before tapping the taps in place with a hammer. 

Tap, tap tap… the sound of the first drops of sap dropping in the bucket.  The buckets on the southeast side of the woods get the most sun, so two days into the season the sap is rat-tat-tatting at a pretty fast clip already.  Deeper in the woods, it’s more of a tap… wait for it… wait for it… tap!

Tap, tap, tap…the sound of impatiently drumming fingers on the table as we eagerly await the first boil of the season!

(Sugar) Shackin' Up

The mild winter this year put the kibosh on our planned cross-country ski trail through the woods.  But the lack of snow has extended the outdoor construction season across the entire state, and Kopp’s Crops has jumped on the bandwagon.  One of our biggest worries every season has been the threat of a rainy spring.  Barrels of sap don’t wait for a dry day, and it’s difficult to make any progress when raindrops fill up the boiling pan faster than it evaporates.  So over Christmas break, with ground still snowless and temperatures early-spring mild, we decided to set ourselves up for all-weather boiling.  We started building the Sugar Shack. 

The Sugar Shack is twelve feet square with a three foot overhang (aka front porch) to keep a stack of wood handy & dry.  We set it back about 200 feet into the woods - just far enough to make for a picturesque blog photo.  But don’t be fooled.  The quaint, old-fashioned exterior hides an engineering marvel inside.  Simply building walls & a roof around our boiling stove would create more problems than it solves.  Unless one of the problems we’re trying to solve is “where can we find a good maple syrup sauna?”  So we got a steam hood made to create a vacuum to catch the evaporating water and carry the steam outside through the stack.  Notice that little door on the side of the steam hood in the photo?  Just like the little door on the Tin Man’s chest in “The Wizard of Oz,” it provides access to the heart of the operation – the fragrant boiling syrup.  It lets us easily check on the sap to see how the boiling is going, and making sure we’re not letting it boil down far enough to scorch.

The Sugar Shack’s secondary purpose is to help our sap to boil faster so we don’t have to spend every waking moment of March keeping the fire fed.  With the shack itself protecting the stove from the wind, a new lining of firebrick on the inside of the stove, and a forced air draft to push air through the burning wood to create a hotter, faster fire, we expect to spend a lot less time by the boiling stove, and a lot more time inside eating pancakes & fresh maple syrup with our girls.  Oh, and speaking of the girls, the Sugar Shack serves a third important purpose.  In a household where he’s outnumbered 3 to 1 by women, the Sugar Shack is as close to a “Man Cave” as Jason is going to get! 

New Year, New Dreams

This is a dangerous time of year here at Kopp’s Crops – the time of dreaming, not doing.  The time of year when we’ve forgotten how tired we were of bees, trees, and veggies to freeze by the end of last summer, and we start thinking about expanding our operation.  When “what’s another 50 tapped trees?” and “I mean, is it really any more work to keep 20 hives instead of 10?” become part of the daily conversation.  Everything seems possible, and the reality of the work involved is far enough in the future that it seems manageable.  It’s seed catalog season.

Now that the Christmas catalogs and sales flyers have cleared out, the seed catalogs are weighing down the letter carriers’ pouches and filling the Kopp family mailbox.  The Jung’s catalog is our favorite – it’s like the seed version of the Neiman-Marcus catalog; page after page of stunning photographs that make us want to buy, buy, buy!  But just like the Neiman-Marcus one, Jung’s tends to be the catalog that we wish from, not what we buy from.  Last season, we bought many of our seeds in bulk – by the pound, not the teeny little envelope.  The cost per seed is significantly less, and we can store the extra seeds for several years.  As long as we keep the seeds cool & dry, the germination rate only decreases 2-3% each year.

Before we place any orders for the year, we need to get a handle on what our current seed stock looks like, so last week we pulled the leftovers from last season out of the cellar and took inventory.  After portioning out this season’s seed needs, we vacuum-sealed our 2013+ seeds to keep out moisture and keep the seeds from rotting.  Looks like we’ll be set on lettuce, carrots, beets and green onions for the next few years!  How many beets can you ougrow with a pound of beet seeds?  Let’s just say that we expect to be eating beets grown from these seeds at our daughters’ graduations!

Packing It Up for the Season

The garden isn’t completely toast, but it’s close.  Out of the roughly 25 total rows of veggies in the garden (some of which got replanted mid-season after the first crops petered out), only 3 remain.  We lost our last row of green beans when we failed to cover it before last week’s unexpected (at least by us) frost, along with our half row of eggplant.  The half-row of swiss chard is hanging tough & standing tall, along with the fall plantings of lettuce, spinach, and radishes that should be ready to start harvesting in a couple weeks if the weather holds out.  Our Brussels sprouts are still going strong, too.  Or as strong as we could hope – this is the 3^rd year we’ve planted Brussels sprouts, and the first year we’ve actually gotten edible sprouts on the plants before the snow flies!  The funny thing about Brussels sprouts (aside from the fact that our family actually likes to eat them, unlike 95+% of the US population!) is that it takes a solid frost to really make them really good – once they survive a good frost, they get a little less bitter.  Unlike Michelle, who gets more bitter after the first frost (Really?  Winter’s coming already?).

Everything else has been harvested and put away for winter. What can be canned is canned, what can be frozen is frozen, and what can’t be kept at all has been eaten at every other meal until we’re completely sick of it (that would be you, eggplant) or put at the end of the driveway with a big “FREE!” sign (yep, a sure-fired way to get rid of anything in our neighborhood).  We hung a cylinder made out of chicken wire in the garage to contain all the onions, and tied our garlic bulbs together into a big keep-away-the-vampires bridal bouquet that hangs off the top, along with a few sprigs of rosemary.  The potatoes are all in a big burlap bag in the cellar where they’ll stay nice & cool.  The baby reds don’t keep as well, so we’ll eat them first, saving the white potatoes until their eyes start sprouting white tentacles.  At which point we’ll give them to the girls to play “octopus adventure” or practice braiding & macramé. The sweet potatoes, including the football-sized one you see pictured below, keep best in a big bucket of dry sand.  This year we’re using a wide, shallow one, because last year we never finished the sweet potatoes – we got to frustrated trying to dig down to the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket full of sand.  Which brings us to the butternut squash – they just sit in neat little rows on the shelves in the cellar like bowling pins. Oh, there was that sorry attempt to can spiced apple rings last weekend, which ended with a big pot of spiced apple mush and curlicues of spiced apple peel, but we’re trying to put that behind us.  Let’s just say that our compost bin has a faint but lovely smell of cinnamon, cloves and overcooked apples.