Sugaring & Painting

Temperatures dipped below freezing earlier this week, stopping the sap flow for a few days, but we are back in business today with yet another experiment. Boiling the sap on the stove in the house is fast, but it fogs up the entire house and I've been warned that eventually sap will start to accumulate on the ceiling from the steam, attracting bugs. Yet another person warned me that the steam can start to peel paint on the walls and/or cabinets in the kitchen.

Taking this into consideration, we set up an old propane grill in the barn stalls and boiled down there for the majority of the day. The grill isn't as fast as the house stove, but it's faster than the wood burning stove we were initially using. It does takes quite a bit of propane to keep the sap boiling all day, so we've decided that when we do this again next year, we'll need to make or buy an evaporator. For now, we are boiling down a little at a time, then freezing the liquid before it is finished. We will combine the frozen packets together and finish them all at once at the end.

In other news, we've finished painting the walls in the downstairs bedroom today ↓

And while the paint was still wet, Riley stuffed his head behind the radiator to scrounge for crumbs, smearing paint all over his face. I was able to get most of it off, but he's still got a moss green tipped ear :)