Time to Plant

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With the recent snowfall leaving us with a very white Sunday, it is hard to believe that we are into Spring. Winter is having a hard time letting go.

Since we were still in a springtime mood for the majority of the week. We decided to begin planting our various herb and vegetable seeds. We are confident that the Growing Dome will provide us with enough of a temperature difference that we no longer have to fear frost. In fact, the lone Strawberry plant has survived and is already blooming.

In the Growing Dome, the Strawberries are blooming.

This meant that we could finally get our hands dirty. We filled some trays and planted all the seeds we could. Of course we have so many varieties on hand, this will be an important part of our activities this coming week as well.

Getting our hands in the dirt, it was time to plant.

We even took this opportunity to start our Baco Noir cuttings. We gave them a clean cut and potted them with a root promoting hormone.

Starting grapes from cuttings.

All of this activity had us return to the growing beds (the final resting place for the majority of our seedlings).

We started to line the bottom of our first bed with newspaper. Then we faced our first obstacle. Although the top soil was very wet, only an inch or two below the ground, the soil was all ice. This effectively prevented us from doing much with the bed since the next step was anchoring it to the ground. We'll definitely have to wait for warmer weather before proceeding with this project.

Lining our new raised bed with newspaper.

In the meantime, we continued work on the Maple syrup. The sap has been running although quite inconsistently. This late Spring coupled with large day to day temperature fluctuations has probably impacted the industry this season.

For us, we still aim to beat last year's production. It's easy since we started out with so little.

So most of the weekdays were spent collecting, filtering and evaporating. We remember last year the last stage where we could sit on the deck until evening drinking a glass of wine...definitely not the case this year. We put our evaporation pot on the fire and run inside for warmth.

Collecting Maple sap in the bush

Filtering the sap using a felt filter

Topping up the evaporator with newly collected sap

It seems that even the Black Walnut trees are starting to yield some sap. We estimate that within 2 weeks we should be able to complete our experiment with Black Walnut syrup.

Black Walnut sap....showing some promise

I'll leave you this week with another thrill we've enjoyed over the Winter months: auctions. Local auctions are a great way to acquire used equipment or furnishings. The prices are often more than reasonable and there is always that opportunity to stumble on a little treasure.

At our last auction, Christine had her eyes set on two antique (c. 1850) pieces of furniture: a hutch and a cupboard. They'll be perfect to provide the right atmosphere in our new Tea Room.

Plato Auctions...a lot of fun and where we've managed to purchase some good antiques