Category: Homesteading

Half Tapped

We got the trees at the top of the driveway (12), the ones at the bottom (2), and the ones along the river (9) tapped today. 23 trees tapped. Tomorrow, we’ll get the back woods (17 trees), the black walnuts at the farm (three or four), plus the new trees at the farmhouse (no idea — at least one huge black walnut and one huge sugar maple). That’s around 23 more. Which means we are halfway done tapping!

Although there is one up the hill at the bottom of the driveway and two more up a hill along the river that we don’t generally tap (fetching sap is dangerous, especially as the ground thaws and it is muddy!). There are also the two maples by the house that never produce sap, the enormous one by the river that I was very disappointed to learn also does not produce sap, and the big sugar maple in the front yard that we are letting recover. Seven untapped trees.

Hawks and Eagles

I’m not sure if it is because the winter has been particularly cold or the local lake is drained and the ecosystem is disrupted … but we’ve never had a problem with hawks and eagles until this year. For most of the year, the buzzards keep them away. But this month! We lost a duck to a hawk — I came around the corner and saw the thing eating a duck. A week or so later, two ducks were missing and big feathery spots were in the duck yard. We put a small radio tuned to a talk station out in the duck yard — which seems to have helped there, but we lost two chickens today. I think a rooster tried to rescue the hen and was taken out. So Anya spent the day making scarecrows for both the duck and chicken yard. I mounted old CDs around the fence.

Sick Kitten!

Our younger cat growled at me when I picked him up this morning. When I put him down — he’s a bit of a growler — he had a bit of a limp. We kept him indoors and, as the day went on, his left hind leg got swollen. Scott took him into a local vet, and he had an infected bite! He’s got pain killers for a few days, and he got dosed up with antibiotics. I moved the cat bed into our family room so we could keep an eye on him as he sleeps and recovers.