Well, today is the official first day of spring, but this is what we woke up to last Monday morning:
Not very encouraging, I know. We are all a little snow weary this season, as we've had 6 snow storms in the past 6 weeks. It's still a new concept to me and I do enjoy the unscheduled "snow days" from going into the office, but even I'm like, "ENOUGH!"
But even as I type this post, the sun is shining outside, almost all that snow is melted, and the temperatures are supposed to get into the 50's or 60's today. Here's hoping that spring is just a little bit closer.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Sugar Shack
Last weekend, hubby and I took a day trip and headed
southwest to Highland County, VA for their annual Maple Festival. We had been
meaning to go to this festival for the past couple of years, but never got
around to it for one reason or another. It’s only held for the first two
weekends in March, and from what I understand, the maple sap used to make maple
syrup only flows for a short time here in Virginia. I guess you can’t nail down
Mother Nature for an exact date!
From what I gathered, the best maple sap to collect from
trees in Virginia is from the ones that grow between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above
sea level. We definitely spent a lot of
time driving on twisty-windy mountain roads to find this festival! Straight from the tree, maple sap (or sugar
water) collected from maple trees is made up of approximately 98% water and 2%
sugar. It takes approximately 40 quarts of sugar water to make 1 quart of maple
syrup, and a good tree will produce 20 quarts of sugar water every 12 hours!
The Maple Festival featured several sugar shacks that
demonstrated how to make maple syrup. To make syrup, excess water is boiled
away from the sap. Because a large amount of steam is produced when boiling off
the sap, it’s not recommended to do this indoors, hence the separate sugar
shacks. Making maple syrup on the home front usually involves using one large
pot, but at a sugar shack, they use huge troughs filled with sugar water and
build very hot wood fires under each trough to boil off the sap.
Can you imagine if you made this much steam in your house?
It would be a good way to peel away ugly wall paper!
It was still pretty chilly outside, but the sugar shacks
were VERY toasty and smelled wonderful. It was like a hillbilly day spa!
At each stop along the Maple Festival route, there were all
kinds of maple-y treats being sold. We enjoyed a few of the local maple donuts that day.
After the festival, we stopped at a local freshwater trout farm and had one of the best fish sandwiches I've ever had. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture because I was really hungry! Being from Florida, it's not often that I ate freshwater fish. In fact, I don't think I've ever had freshwater trout before that day. All in all, it was a great day!
Picture from Faces of Farmers.org |
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