Time Exploration- Garden Version

Look at this scrappy bit of border.  Early in the spring, things are just poking up from the ground.  The snow is gone for good.  That's when my green thumb gets itchy, and the only cure for it is to get outside for once!

Here we've decided to make the border slightly bigger (and I'm also renovation the rock garden at the end there, right out of sight).  It's at this point that I find strawberry plants, and feel the need to inform mum of each and every one of them.

Mulching is a must-have.  Once it decays, it puts nutrients back in the soil.  Well-rotted compost or wood chips work well for this.

Let the planting commence!  There are a few new-comers here; itty bitty pansies/violas which are just the right size to plant close to stepping stones.  I've also saved a fern from somewhere to put next to the eaves tube drop-off thingy.

Suddenly everything is super green!  My favourite colour!  and of course all the other colours that go with it.

Maple Exploration

Being away during the week means I sometimes miss fun stuff.  Like a newly-developed family hobby of making maple syrup.  For now I'll show you what I discovered about it with my own pictures.  In this photo we see a modern tap on a tree with a tube leading into a recyclable container.  The sap which comes out of the tree should be clear, and doesn't have much flavour.  Collecting sap from maple trees takes place in early spring, when the days are above zero, and the nights below.  Sap collection ends when bud begin to form on the trees, or when the nights are no longer cold enough.  

The next step is to boil down all the collated sap.  There may be multiple boilings during the sugar season, and at the end you get different grades of syrup.  My uncle has a good picture of different bottles lined up which shows the different shades of sap representing the different times during the season when sap was boiled down.  Since it's just a hobby, we don't need any full-sized production equipment; an old stove in a woodshed and a couple of boiler pans are good enough to get the job done.  The lower pan holds the more concentrated sap, and the top pan is used to pre-heat the sap before emptying it into the lower pan.  Once the lower pan gets too full, it is emptied into a pot (which can be brought into the house) where it is boiled down further to the final grade of syrup.

Here the syrup is strained into their final resting place (in bottles- traditionally glass) before they are left to cool, and then gobbled up with pancakes.  Fact - natural syrup does not taste like the sugar liquid you get in the store.  it has a more distinct flavour (which differs depending on the grade and wether or not you burned it), and is possibly an acquired taste.

Exploration Tree

This is the only picture that turned out from an exploration of tree parts I did a while ago.  Our mission was to collect as many parts of a tree as we could from our Exploring the World 'textbook'.  If memory serves me correctly, I got around 68 items.  I don't remember counting any higher than that anyway.  I had to stop collecting as soon as my hand couldn't hold any more sticks while still being able to open the door to get back inside.

Unicorn VS Spatula!

Everyone has to face some sort of battle.  Right now, this unicorn and this transformed spatula are duking it out for some reason or another.  Who will win?!