Fresh syrup!

Well...after collecting sap from our 8 trees (we're just a small homestead in the city!) for 2 weeks and boiling the sap down, we came out with just over 2 litres of delicious syrup!  What a fun learning experience, small-scale that is was, with so much anticipation and incredible results.  Remember, these were syrups made from Black Walnut and Manitoba Maple, not Sugar Maple.  There was lots of tasting at all stages: sap from the tree to thickening syrup, and in the end both our syrups are delicious, yet very distinct flavours that are different from other maple syrup.  More wild and nutty tasting, and oh, so satisfying!  Just another one of those projects we've wanted to try, as we continue to learn to make our handmade life here at our little city farm.  I'd do it again next year, or even look around the neighbourhood to see if other homeowners would like to either share their trees or do their own tapping and share the boiling (in that case we could build a larger evaporator and boil on a fire pit).

Eating our pancakes this morning was the perfect blend of seasons - made with the last blueberries of the past year's harvest, yogurt topped with our last jar of home canned peaches, side by side with this fresh new syrup was the ending of the old year and starting of a new year of production, garden and harvest.  Happy spring!