Brent says that maple syrup is God’s first gift to New Englanders for surviving the winter. I think that that’s true. There’s nothing like seeing those first buckets on the tree to cheer your spirit on an early March day. It always puts me in the mood to reread Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson, the same wonderful children’s book that inspired Brent to tap all the trees in his back yard when he was in middle school.

I personally think it’s quite brilliant that you can turn tree sap into sugar, so much so that for Christmas I asked for a big jug of local maple syrup. My dear husband was the only one who really took me seriously. He went above and beyond and bought me a bottle of homemade syrup from his childhood friend Rosann and her husband Mike who are hobby maple sugarers. They both work full-time at other jobs, and collect buckets of sap during the week from their neighbors’ trees and store it in a tank. During sugaring season they boil all weekend, starting as early as 6 a.m. and staying out as late as midnight, in the mini-sugar shack they built in their suburban backyard, which they call The Maple Hut. They tell us that it takes 40 gallons of sap from a Sugar Maple and 70-80 gallons from other Maples to make one gallon of syrup.

A few weekends ago, we were fortunate enough to go and see The Maple Hut in action. Looking only slightly out of place in its suburban neighborhood, the Maple Hut is everything you’d dream of – old fashioned in design, its rough-sided walls are already covered in vintage maple gear, and as we arrived wood smoke and steam were pouring out of the open windows in its vaulted roof, while the knee-weakening smell of syrup filled the air. Inside, the temperature was downright balmy, as Rosann and Mike shared their story, trading off in their narrative as one of them, summoned by their digital timer, stopped every seven minutes to stoke the fire.

Like Brent, Mike had also tapped trees when he was a kid. So a few years ago, when his friend gave him some sap buckets, he decided it would be fun to tap the trees around their house and see if they could boil some syrup in a turkey fryer. By the next year, they had asked a few of their neighbors if they could tap their trees, too, in exchange for some of their finished syrup. They converted a large barrel into a boiler and spent their weekends boiling outside. The next year Mike bought a fantastic early-20th-century evaporator online and Rosann insisted that they would have to build a shed to house it. And it was then that Maple Hut really came into being.

They started tapping more trees on Mike’s parents’ property as well. Since then they’ve been collecting sugaring gear, both vintage and modern, including a rotary bucket washer, a press filter and tools to help them bottle and cap the syrup. They sell several sizes of syrup – all in American-made glass bottles, granulated maple sugar and maple candy. Of course, we went home with another jug and some maple candy for our Easter baskets.

For a hobby, Rosann and Mike certainly work pretty hard, but one taste of their syrup and I think you’ll agree it’s totally worth it. We can only aspire…

Lingering scent of skunk not withstanding, I was up bright and early last Sunday to see how far I could get with the chicken-house-built-from-scraps project I started Saturday.

The house’s base was constructed with 2X6 dimensional lumber and ¾-inch plywood. It was an entrance ramp in its former life, after all. We made the nest boxes with some ½-inch plywood (painted green on one side), some once-lovely spruce molding, and slats that once decked a pallet. I used exterior-grade “drywall” screws and roofing nails to do the nest-box fastening.

The first step on Sunday was to attach the nesting box structure to the floor with a couple of 2x4 cleats screwed to both the floor and the nest box. Next, I attached a 4x8 sheet of ¾-inch plywood (green paint side out) to the back of the house. I screwed it to the edge of the platform and the nest box, and I built a non-conventional 2x6 frame for the back wall and attached it to the floor and the back wall. You might be wondering why I am using 2x6 lumber for the framing … it is simply that we have about a ton of lovely used 2x6s, 2x8s and 2x12s stacked in the barn … and not a single full-length 2x4 in sight.

I found two matching storm windows stashed in the corner of the barn’s loft and framed them fairly conventionally into the front wall before screwing the works to the platform. With top plates and rafters in place, I installed more of the green-painted plywood on the end wall where the nest boxes are located. By the time evening set in, I had the front wall sided with green plywood, too.

All that’s left now is to side the end opposite the nest boxes, frame the human door and install it, install perches, build the chicken door and ramp, and roof it. With any luck I will accomplish that next weekend … and hopefully it will be warm enough to do a little painting, too.

Part 3 of this adventure will hopefully appear early next week.

Photos are once again courtesy of my sweet bride Kate Will.

Last Saturday, after moving the Mulefoot pig house to the pigs’ paddock, I noticed that we hadn’t put much of a dent in the pile of lumber and other miscellanea in the barn. I was considering spending the rest of the day sitting and watching the pigs, chickens and cattle, but Kate wondered whether I might spend the time more productively by building, or at least starting, a chicken house.

I had tripped over the remnants of a wooden ramp (that once connected the mudroom door with the garage) enough times that I decided to use it as the base upon which to build the structure. Of course, the bulky piece was wedged between the box blade on the Kubota’s 3-point hitch and the barn foundation. After a bit of jockeying and levering, I managed to free the platform and tipped the heavy wooden structure up on edge. This would have been uneventful if the terriers and I didn’t just happen to be staring face to face with a couple of startled skunks who had been huddled beneath it.

After a quick assessment of the situation, I decided to lower the platform to the ground before taking the skunks’ fury full-force in the face. I was so hurried that I trapped Woodrow, the Cairn terrier beneath the structure, right along with them. Knowing that Kate would get after me if I let Woodrow battle two skunks alone, I lifted the platform again, narrowly missing the aromatic spray as I propped it with a stick. Woodrow, in a rare moment of obedience, headed out of the barn on my heels.

The scent wasn’t altogether unpleasant at first. It had tinges of musk, onion and other sulfur-containing compounds. As its power dissipated somewhat, and my over stimulated olfactory nerves calmed down, the smell was, well, very skunky.

Since I really wanted to get the chicken house started, I went back into the barn with a 12-foot-long stick. I peeked over the box blade. No skunks. After a bit of investigating and poking, I discovered that the skunks had moved to the space behind the old Allis-Chalmers combine pickup, left leaning against the wall by the farm’s previous owner. In spite of the smell, I horsed that old piece of ramp outside and set to work.

The first task was to spray some of that de-skunking solution on the underside of the ramp to make the work bearable. And it did.

Kate and I managed to install four short legs beneath the platform and cobble a nest box together before it became too dark to see. By the time we packed up the tools, Lucy the Westie and Woodrow had visited the skunks’ new hideout often enough to wear the badge. Luckily, we had plenty of that magic de-skunk formula left and gave them a good going over. It worked again.

Part 2 coming tomorrow, hopefully .

Photos courtesy Kate Will.