Mar 7

The Memorable, White Windy & Wild Winter of 2014!

76 inches of snow thus far! The snow blanket has provided a nice working environment to remove the trees. Cody stated that he wished we would have kept track of all the man hours involved in clearing the paths in the woods. We have been very blessed in comparison with neighbors, but the woods do appear to be quite a mess in places!

We are very excited to have a new mechanical friend, Walle. He is from Japan. He has done a LOT of work since arriving in late December. We have made multiple cords of wood trying to clear the paths. In addition, we have removed approximately 24 trees from the woods that were damaged/down from the July 10, 2013 storm. They are currently stacked in a large "ker-plunk" style mess outside of the camp. Walle pulls an amazing amount of weight and has not made ruts in the paths. Brad is hoping that our days of getting stuck are over! The entire woods is passable except the soft maple grove! This is a major accomplishment.

March 1st found the college kids home and they distributed the lids and buckets throughout the woods. This gave us time to survey the trees once more. On March 6th, we began to tap. Muff, Bob & Brad got about 70% of the woods tapped after work/school. Brad thinks his fingers will never be the same! They were quite cold. By
March 7th, Cody arrived home for spring break and went to the woods at 1:30 and finished tapping.

The boilermaker, Chuck, showed up to see what was going on  (says the wife threw him out for a while!) He and Brad collected some buckets for the ever expanding Sandhill Rd. taps. Cody & Gerri took a nice sunset walk and checked the taps finding that most buckets have 3 inches or so in them. Very peaceful, still, evening tonight. This is a blessing as there are some limbs that need to be watched overhead!

Bob & Brad loaded Walle on a trailer we have named Eve (in keeping with our movie theme). We took Walle home, stopping at the Metzger farm to load the plastic gathering tank. Cody is working on welding up a platform to make the sap loading easier. We are going to work different muscle groups this year!

The texts & phone calls are coming, so we have a plan to gather tomorrow... we will see if mother nature cooperates!