Welcome to Spring
April 16, 2019
The weather has been, well, the weather. Warm, cold, snow, rain, sun and clouds. April is always an interesting month. This year we had an excellent Maple syrup season, almost 23 gallons of syrup made. Considering our Silver Maples produce about 45 gallons of sap for 1 gallon of syrup that means my long suffering wife, with help from our son and his friends, turned over 1,000 gallons of sap into syrup on a wood fired Arch with a 2′ x 4′ pan. Doing a bit more math, that means a total of about 140 hours of boiling and another 30 hours of finishing and bottling, another 5 hours of collecting sap and you get about 7.5 hours of labor per gallon of syrup. She sure works hard!
The rest of the farm is ramping up as we eagerly anticipate the start of the growing season. Spring is also a time to plan the new year and dream about what we can accomplish for this round. My father recently retired and has offered to help with the farm work. Careful what you offer Pa. We are raising more animals, more hay and more crops than ever before so his additional help is much appreciated. I’m often asked about how we do it all. The answer is, we don’t. We do our best and the Lord provides the strength and opportunities but at the end of the day, some things won’t happen they way we planned. You can look at a the growing season as an epoch of iterative projects. We have a huge backlog of tasks and sub projects that we constantly add to and evaluate. We pick a group of them for our sprint and when that is done go back to the backlog and pick some more. At some point we as the product owner say “That’s it. that set of projects are done and we will save the rest for next year”. We start the whole process over again for the next season.
One last note before I sign-off. We are honored to let you know there is a feature article in the Stockman Grass-Farmer periodical ( www.stockmangrassfarmer.com) about our farm. It’s always fun to find out someone else is interested in your passion. We are excited about the article but I’m more excited about getting the chance to talk with our customers at the markets. Stop by this summer and I’ll tell you all about it.
Until next time – Live Well,
The Guy with the Hat.