So I wonder if you can make alcohol from your syrup? Is that a thing?
I can guess that there are two important factors there. I’m a biologist, but not the plant kind.
First is the tree variety. Sugar maples, which are used in Canada, might naturally produce sap with higher sugar content. (edit: I can’t tell from the bark whether you’re tapping sugar maples. You could probably tap many kinds of trees and produce sap with enough patience; just wanted to comment that in case you were not dealing with maples.)
Second is the climate. The cold might help to concentrate sugar in the sap because of reduced evapotranspiration in the winter time. There needs to be a little bit of water moving in order to draw out sap in the first place, but it needs to be cold enough that the sap is still concentrated. Canada has a long period of cold with mild day time temperatures that sort of fits the bill, from February until the thaw in April-ish.
This is guesswork on my part, to be clear. Although I don’t know the KY climate, I would safely guess that Canada’s cold season is longer and colder which may have something to do with it.
I know you don’t have children but since you’re DIYing your food a little bit I just wanted to point this out, as well:
Honey != syrup, but I’d caution against it anyway.
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I have a Makita Electric Pole saw with three speed selector. It us the dual battery setup to make sure you have all of the torque that you need. Makita offers a dual battery setup for all of their yard and landscaping equipment. You have a choice of 2.0Ah - 5.0Ah batteries.
March 2022 Updates: Spring Projects Galore
We’ve had an unseasonably warm March overall this year, which has allowed me and my husband to get out early to complete some projects before planting season begins in earnest. The biggest one of these is finally getting our raised beds set up.
Raised Bed Construction & Planting
We bought concrete blocks back in the Fall but the soil was too cool and wet for us to do much with them at the time. Now that it’s warming up + we have been blessed with the power of the rototiller (long may it reign), we were able to dig to begin work on our first raised bed. I didn’t get a ton of pics of the early stages, but it’s mainly just:
- Till into the heavy clay dookie mud.
- Attempt to level the ground.
- Drop a block in place.
- Get frustrated because the block isn’t level.
- Attempt to level block.
- It’s still not level.
- WTF.
- Oh there it goes.
- Repeat.
A few people asked me whether I’d try hugelkulture gardening and this is my attempt at that. We had a lot of blown down sticks and limbs from the ice storms this winter so the bottom layer of the bed is mostly that. I also mixed in a lot of maple and oak leaves that had collected around our garage. This was a nice way to lower the cost for filling + the organic materials should break down over time to help fertilize the bed slowly.
Also pictured in here: our dead mini-Christmas tree that I SAVED for a moment such as this.
All sticks and dirt hand picked and placed by artisans. And by artisans I mean me.
Once I had a good base layer of sticks/leaves/fill dirt, I added compost on top and mixed til the bed was filled almost to the top. Some of the compost came from my personal tumbler, though I did have to buy a couple bags to make sure I got enough coverage. I also added a bit of old potting mix that I had overwintering in the garage.
First plants! Spinach and romaine lettuce starts on one side; the other is dedicated to radishes but they haven’t sprouted yet.
And of course, after a month of warm temps, we’re due for frosts the next few days, so I had to improvise a redneck frost cover. This is just rebar tucked into the blocks with thin PVC pipe fitted across. I probably should’ve gotten a shorter length…
AND if you think it couldn’t get any worse, let me show you the actual covers… These are just painter drop cloths held on with chip clips and spare rocks. It’s technically not a real cover but it should keep the seedlings warm enough in the cold. And that’s what matters.
This one bed is large enough to fit a quite a bit which is great. We still have a ton of blocks though, and I’m hoping we can get at least one more done before summer planting in May.
A Failed Project: Indoor Seed Starting
Earlier in the month I decided I’d try to start seeds indoors. I’ve usually bought starts from greenhouses in the past but it felt like it was time to level up and start learning to do it from scratch. I planted lettuce and spinach seeds, hooked up a grow light, and waited. It started off well enough:
But after they germinated, these little seeds wilted and died as suddenly as they sprang up. After doing some reading I suspect they may have ‘dampened off’. I was misting them twice a day and in hindsight I probably could’ve done that once a day (or even every other day). A lesson learned! I didn’t put all my eggs in this basket luckily.
A Maybe Not Failed Project: Outdoor Seed Starting
I had some extra seeds after my indoor seed starting adventure, so as usual I chaotically sowed some outdoors along with some onion starts because WHY NOT. I didn’t really expect them to sprout at all, but I was surprised to find some lettuce seedlings poking through today?!?
They’re even pushing through the woodchips, which is amazing for how tiny they are. The onions haven’t even poked out yet and these guys are out here putting them to shame. I will have to cover them before those frosts though…
Additional Projects To Come SoonTM
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Moar Blueberries Bushes?
-
Wildflowers and sunflowers?
-
A tire swing…?
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My back hurts just reading this! It does look like it’s starting to shape up and come together. I hope the salad seedlings make it through the cold.
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Its apparently an exceptionally good way of handling it. When its comes to ground settling. Ground level gardening is prone to eventually becoming a pit without replacement soil. The raised garden compacts the ground under it.
Also provides an easy to way to add compost. Thats cool. Wonder if it will improve your harvest given the superior drainage of the designs
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Ran across this article and thought you might want to investigate.
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I have the Sthil battery powered leaf blower (BGA 57) and so far I have been very happy with the run time.
I also have the gas FS 240R brush cutter / pole saw, the thing is a beast. It works great for trimming limbs and small trees. With the right rotary blade I can cut up to 2" diameter trees with a good swing and rpm. But it takes no time to swap the heads. Just depends on how heavy of work you plan on doing.
I typically use a little Worx 20v battery powered grass trimmer around the house and flower beds. It feels extremely cheap but it just keeps running.
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We always preferred horse Manure, cow was a big no! Even then we only used horse manure in the flower beds and not the garden. (could have been the garden was 4-6 acres)
The compost/manure mix we used was just the standard bagged stuff from a garden center since we didn’t have quite enough of our own processed to use. The plants seem to be reacting to it just fine so far, but we also mixed it with topsoil and old garden soil. I may buy a few more bags to mix into our heavy clay soil to amend it for berry plants soon.
The lettuce seedlings are truckin’, we had a frost last night and they shrugged it off like champs!
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I made the mistake of leaving the heater on high as I got ready to head out the door and forgot. Returning six hours later, I came to see all of my starts in my grow area shriveled up. I am so mad at myself. All of the mature starts weathered okay but all of the tomato leaves were curling.
Tomatoes normally love heat! Was it just blasting on them directly for the six hours? Seedlings seem so finicky.
Yeah, My wife had opened the vent in that area when she was working in there. The vent was blowing directly on the grow station.
We also have a heating pad there for the seedlings @ ~73F and the grow lights (while LED) still put off a little bit of heat. The BT weather station reported about 88F with 10% humidity in that room. We keep the room @ ~40-45% humidity as it is dry on our island in the Winter. Everything was dry.
That sucks, hopefully they recover! 
I only recently learned about heating pads for seed starting, they seem like a game changer. I may pick one up soonish to try out with a lid to make a little mini-greenhouse.
This is the ultimate combination. Unfortunately I ran out of space so I hat to take off the dome for some of the plants that were pushing against it, otherwise the little guys would have been spared.
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Have you tried steaming the earth (not sure if it’s the right term) after mixing it? Basically means sterilise the potting mix with heat. Since I started doing it issues with growing fungi have been minimized or plants get old enough to withstand them.
Any special reason for not putting them on the windowsill?
I read about that recently but haven’t tried it yet myself. I may do so in the future to prevent the die off I got this time.
Also I had these on the windowsill for a while but I’ve found that my seedlings tend to get really leggy when I try that. Even though the window is south facing I guess they don’t get enough light there. Hence the grow light to help out.
July 2022
Realized I posted an update in the wrong thread a while ago, oops. Here’s a quick update for July:
Onions
I have started harvesting and curing some of our onions. This was my first year planting them, and I learned a lot. Mainly that they don’t like full sun + I should’ve planted them a tad deeper. But we still got a good crop and there’s more to pull soon.
What they look like in the dirt as their tops fall over:
Curing in the basement:
If anyone has any hot onion curing tips, I’m all ears. My understanding is that they just need to be a dry cool environment for a few weeks to toughen up so they’ll be storage-ready but ???
Wildflowers
Kinda a mixed bag on the sunflowers and wildflowers this year as well. I tilled up the dirt in a few areas but didn’t mix any compost or other amendments when sowing my seeds. I had a very low germination rate, unfortunately (I also think I ended up feeding the birds more than anything lol).
Squash
In better news, I have successfully combated the squash bugs this year by picking them off and drowning them in soapy water. No incursions on the plants to speak of right now! We are starting to get some nice butternut squash forming, and the pumpkins are blooming too.
MegaLettuce
I am letting some of the lettuce I grew in the spring go to seed to replant in the fall. It makes a really neat tower formation. It feels very Dr.Seuss!
Tomatoes
And of course, I have tomatoes growing too. The tomatoes had a brief episode of blossom end rot that I corrected with a mix of crushed up tums + eggshells + garden sulphur. I removed the affected fruit so the plant wouldn’t put any more energy into them, and the problem seems to be corrected on new fruit now!
Corn
The corn is finally starting to create ears on some of the stalks! I am hoping that the wind will pollinate them so I don’t have to hand-pollinate like when I grew them in containers. Fingers crossed.
Harvests
And finally, a look at some of my harvests thus far. Homemade pickles (still refining crunchiness levels), wild blackberries (still lots of those to harvest), first tomatoes and cucumbers. I’m hoping to get potatoes up soonish as well-- though I’ve been fighting some potato beetles on them, so we’ll see how that goes.
Bonus forgotten update: I also tried my hand at pickling my radish harvest a couple weeks ago. These were a lot more crispy than the cucumber pickles, so far I think I like them a bit better:
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I want to get more into wall garden hydroponics. Stuff that’s containable and no flooding mess. Things that improve indoor air quality. Thoughts? Suggestions?
Not sure if it’s something you’ve done before