For once my Monday Motivation is not about cleaning or working, but about showing hospitality and sharing our experience making maple syrup. This week on one of the homeschool yahoo groups someone posted about a maple syrup event that was a great children’s activity especially for homeschoolers, however, it was with a cost. I know how much homeschoolers watch their budgets, after all I am one! So without too much thought I posted inviting interested families to our house for a FREE homeschool activity to see what we have done to make our own maple syrup this year. After I hit send, I was like, “Oh-oh, what have I done?” I wasn’t expecting much response and about four families responded. Therefore, we’ll be getting ready for our guests this week, as I thought hot chocolate and homemade cookies were in order to go along with the children learning about where maple syrup comes from and how it is made.

The catch is we got snow and it is colder so the sap may not be running this week, but we’ll wait and see. Someone said it was going to hit the 50’s by mid-week, which will be perfect and muddy. It should be fun to meet new people and share what the Lord has blessed us with here with our maple trees and space.

This week’s motivation is to share our home and maple syrup adventure with other homeschooling families. Hopefully blessing them by helping them save money on an outing and to show them if we can do it so can they!

The Rest of Our Maple Syrup Story

Obviously we are not done tapping our trees or collecting sap, nevertheless, I thought it was time to show the rest of our maple syrup adventure or what we have recorded so far. We’ve had a few mishaps and bumps in the road and may not get as much sap as we had hoped. You see, we have had wind blow our bags off, we have had them fall off due to being too heavy and we have had certain family members dump our maple syrup down the drain thinking it was water in the pot! Yeah, that’s what I said. This happened two different times by two different people and I am like, “Can’t you ask first? We are making syrup!?” Talk about aggravating, to say the least. Both individuals were apologetic and felt bad, but accidents happen…..still, just ask!

Our Tapping Adventure Continues

Drilling.

The younger ones wanted to try too.

The tap is in. We were not very happy about the sap dripping out below the tap, but that was rectified once we got the drill boring the right way!

The bags were put on the little metal hangers and set on the taps.

The day we put them up the sap was running fast. This is what we got within the first couple of hours.

Then by late afternoon, look what we had!

We improvised when we ran out of metal hangers and use a milk jug and wire.

This pot was full of sap and you have to boil it down to almost nothing.

Then we filtered the sap to get dirt and any other unwanted particles out of the syrup.

Baby wanted in on the action too.

Not a lot of syrup and by the time we had bottle it (sorry no picture of that!) we only got a quart out of 3-4 bags of sap. It wasn’t as thick as we would have liked, so it should have been boiled more. We know that for the next batch we do, as we are living and learning as we go along.

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