Scenes from February at Cold Feathers Farm

In February, Deborah and I painted wood for a new set of shelves in our garage. 

After two weekends, they were finished.   And since they would always be filled with stuff from now on, I had the kids get up on them before I filled them.

 A wonderful dinner of mussels and shrimp that I made one cold Sunday night.

 And of course, we had to go see the 3D version of Star Wars I.  In costume of course!

Stephen and my dh saw this one cold morning.  Can you tell what happened?

Our guess is that it was a mouse that crept out of a bramble and then got eaten by an owl.  See the wing marks near the top of the picture and how the mouse tracks just end?

Bird Boy

Encouraged by his previous success, Aaron went out twice this week to see if he could any birds to land on his hand.  This one flitted from tree to tree getting up his nerves.

Finally he got up the nerve and landed.

 It's a little hard to see, but I caught this one hovering right above his hands.

 Finally he landed as well.

 A blurry close up.

 Aaron has really enjoyed getting the chickadees to land on his hands.   He's even touched one of them on the  back.   Now his next goal is to get a nuthatch to eat out of his hands.

A Hunting We Will Go!

This year both Nathan and Stephen participated in the youth hunt.   Some deer were spotted but none close enough to get a shot at.    Today they are trying their hand at bow hunting.   

Fun in the Woods

Deborah and Aaron have made nature forts in our woods.   Deborah has camouflaged hers with branches from a tree that was cut down.   She's also tried to transplant some wild sage and some mint but I don't think they made it. 

 Aaron's fort from the back.

 Aaron's fort from the front.

 We had some beautiful sunlit days this summer.

 We did have some trees fall down so my dh got his John Deere out and went after those trees.  He wanted to drag the trees to the meadow and cut them into firewood there.

 It's hard to tell from the picture but he's chained three logs together and successfully drug them out of the woods.

More pictures of Summer

At the end of summer, my dh, Nathan, and Stephen started practicing with their bows.   They are all three determined to get a deer this year.

 Deb and Aaron enjoying a soda on the porch.

Birds and Butterflies

The Cardinals are back!

Aaron sat for a long time and tried to get a chickadee to eat out of his hands. There was one brave one that couldn't quite get up enough courage to go all the way to Aaron. He would fly down until he was about 2 feet away and then fly back to a branch.

My parents are visiting and we made our annual trip to the Butterfly House.

It was a sunny day and the butterflies were very active.

Maple Syrup!!

Last Saturday we boiled down our maple sap. This is the first year we've tried to use our new metal pans. Overall it was a fantastic success. My dh built a fire box out of concrete blocks.

First we put one pan on and tested it with just 2 gallons of sap. No leaks this time so we were good to go.

Then we put on the second pan. That pan had one leak but it seemed to close up once the pan got hot.

We kept the fire going all day (well, my dh and children did). I was inside a lot of the day finishing up the sap that I had already boiled down on the screened in porch in my big electric cooker.

Here's a close up of the fire and the high tech leak containment system we employed.

It wasn't hard work, just steady work. Someone had to keep adding wood to the fire and someone else had to keep adding sap. Nathan was mostly chopping firewood.

My dh estimated that if we kept the sap at a rolling boil, we would boil off 7 gallons of water per hour.

We gathered a lot of dead wood from the woods to keep the fire going.

We boiled into the night and then filled up both pans with all the sap we had left and went to bed.

On Sunday after church, we started boiling again and got the sap boiled down so that it fit in one pan. We continued boiling and were just about to give it another half hour or so when it started to snow. That did it. We strained the sap and brought it indoors.

We had about 8 gallons of the reduced sap when we brought it in. I strained it once more using a special paper filter and then it was time to boil inside with the vent on full blast. I boiled this sap Sunday night and then some on Monday morning and finished about lunchtime.

End result: 159.5 gallons of sap collected and 3 gallons, 3 quarts, and 1 pint of syrup canned. We actually had two different types of syrup. That is almost a 40 to 1 ratio which is excellent considering that we only have red maples, not sugar maples.

The lighter syrup was made from the sap that was collected early and reduced on the porch. The darker syrup was made from the later sap. The darker color is natural for sap that is collected closer to the end of the season. The lighter syrup is very delicate in flavor but the darker syrup is more robust and seems like it has a touch of molasses in it.

Both were excellent on pancakes the next day!

Winter Pictures

It's been a long snowy winter (it's snowing right now!). The deer are getting desperate. There isn't much left under the bird feeder after the birds and squirrels finish.

We tapped our maple trees a couple of weeks ago. We've had a slow start to the season. I hope it isn't indicative of the whole maple season.

Deborah, tired out from tromping through the snow.

I used the mock mincemeat that I canned last year from an overabundance of green tomatoes. I liked it but the rest of the family was not that impressed. I made it using an free form pie crust.

Aaron's horse picture, made with colored pencils.

Winter is definitely the time to get under the quilts and read.

Winter Birds

We finally put out some suet and soon the mysterious bird network had spread the word that food was available at our feeders. Soon we had some nuthatches, blue jays, and woodpeckers all coming around.

This is a male Downy Woodpecker.

This Red Bellied Woodpecker would never stay still long enough for me to get a clear picture.

Yesterday we had one of the Pileated Woodpeckers that is living in our woods come by.