Sat Eve March 21st… Back from Washington County & Sugaring…

Well we returned from Washington County and a big day of seeing a real, top of the line, Maple Sugaring operation, at the Dry Brook Sugar House on Chambers Road, in Salem, NY.
Before we got to the sugar house, we stopped at a little store in Cambridge that sells beads and supplies. It was called Over the Moon Beads. Vick bought a bunch of beads and other stuff. What a neat place and meeting Sara was really nice too. If you’re ever in Cambridge, NY, stop on West Main Street to visit them. After leaving there, we went on to the sugar shack.
We arrived there just in time, because within fifteen minutes of our arriving, they ran out of sap and had to shut down the operation. We were however lucky enough to talk to Bob Chambers himself and got to see Bob’s dad, John Jr. who you see gathering sap in the 1940’s picture on the home page of their website. John Jr. used to use a horse and sled to gather his sap, but now Bob says alost all of their collected sap comes from pipe lines between tapped trees and gravity flows down the ridges to the catch containers at the bottom of the ridge. You can see the pictures below, showing you exactly what we saw. Bob told us that they started today with 10,000 gallons of sap, which gave them about 200 gallons of dark amber syrup in the end. Seems like a lot of work for only a 2% return by volume………Bob said you need the cool nights near freezing, and the warm 50° days to make the sap really run. Part of their huge farm is in New York and part is in Vermont, but all the land that they draw sap from is on their own land.
Once we returned home from the days events, we met Stanley Maltzman, Joyce W., and Lois B. at Ruby’s restaurant in Freehold, NY, to see an art display in the upstairs gallery. It was a complete and beautiful oil painting display by James Cramer…… an excellent area painter, who does beautiful work. How we would love to have a few of his paintings in our house to place beside Stanley’s works. From the Gallery…… we went to Green Hill Café in Norton’s Hill, for a divine dinner and chatting and laughing. Upon leaving Frank’s (Green Hill Café ) we dropped Lois off at her home and went in to see her studio shop. Lois is a potter and has all the tools and a ton of beautifully, finished pottery for sale. Some day we will go visit, to watch her throw pottery and we’ll take pictures.

Here is the Evaporator

Look at that dark amber syrup pour out.

This is John Jr., Bob's father. Here he is enjoying pancakes, covered with the product he, his son and son-in-law perfected over the years. Go to their site below this picture to see what this young entrepreneur was doing in the 1940's !
http://www.drybrooksugarhouse.com/home.html

The old fashioned, traditional way to gather the sap.










The modern way to collect sap. The largwe blue line runs up the ridgesto the tapped trees and each tree donates it's sap to the lines, flowing down to the large catch container. The collection time is reduced greatly allowing the Chambers to run the dairy farm too.

The ridge behind the sugar house

The bedding building..... full of wood chips for the cow's bedding.

Feed silo's

Equipment sheds and some big equipment!

A wagon with two white collection containers on it, goes to the containers with the pipelines.

Some of their dairy cattle

One of their tapped ridges.

All these ridges, looking toward Vermont are tapped. They all belong to the Dry Brook Sugar House farm.

Views on the way home

Sat March 21st...Off we go to the Sugar Shack

We’re off to see the sugar gathering operations of the Dry Brook Sugar House in Salem, New York today. It is an open house that is done every year and we have been threatening and planning to go to one for a long time now, so today is the day. We will take pictures to post this evening, so stay tuned…Pictures at eleven... Ha, Ha (I always wanted to say that)

Friday March 20th… The first day of spring and it’s cold……

We’ll take it… twenty-nine degrees is far better than the howling, blowing winter winds we came from a month ago. The snow is gone and the sun is trying to push old man winter back up north again, until fall beckons his return, but he’s a stubborn old coot. Today we cannot leave the critters free to run, because we have a spring concert to attend this evening at the Tannersville high school, where our niece, Katie is performing along with her classmates. After leaving there with Kenny and Katie, we are going to take them home so we can visit with family and have coffee and desert. Anita called Wednesday evening, around five o’clock and asked if we wanted to meet them in Kingston for dinner, but we couldn’t go because all of the animals were out, free ranging on the property. Once they are out, you are committed to be home until dark when they go back into their barns. It is impossible to get them in before dark…… as they will not go. It would be like trying to catch a bag of marbles, rolling on a cone roof, all of them go in different directions at once. Last evening just at dusk…when you could barely see, we put the ducks, chickens, guinea hens and turkey’s away while listening to the coyotes in the field next to the yard, squalling and yelping as they ran a deer or some other animal down. They were within one hundred or two hundred yards of us at the time. We could hear them plainly and I fear sometime that they will burst into the yard and start grabbing chickens or the turkeys which are sitting turks. ( same as ducks, only different…ha, ha ) Anyway, I keep the shotgun loaded, right inside the kitchen door…… a Remington 1100 autoloader, with about a 36” full choke turkey barrel and a magazine that holds five shells, at the ready all the time. If it doesn’t get them while in our yard, it sure as hell will scare them and you can empty it of all five rounds, in about two seconds. I’d feel bad about shooting them, but we gotta protect our animals.

Thurs Eve March 19th… So close… yet so far away… We knew it!!!

We knew that when Spring was ushered in it would be at the hands of Ol’ Man Winter again…… We are only two hours away from the beginning of Spring 2009 and it’s gonna be 25 degrees! That’s ok though, because we are gonna have some exceptionally nice weather and warm sunny days in the first part of the week to come. It will be nice up until Wednesday and then we are to get a few rainy days, but the temperatures will be almost fifty even in the rain.
Today, we gathered eggs, moved the purple marten bird house from where we are going to build the rabbit warren, on out along the fence to an open area. They will do just fine there and it will be out of our way. They are due in here anytime now. Last year they showed up in the final days of March, but were gone…… with their little ones before August.
Everything is almost completed for the arrival of the Alpacas next month. The only think we need to do yet is cut a drop hole upstairs for hay and get a metal wall feeder from Greene County Horseshoe supply, down the road. No big deal…
I just dropped the port-a-pump utility pump into the swimming pool and drained all of the water out of the bottom…… as best I could. There was about 16 inches of standing water in there, which tells me the breech was not on the bottom of the liner. It had to be above the sixteen inch mark. My guess is in the area of the submerged steps or the skimmer or eyeball socket. The ice was over a foot thick on the sides and was solid from the top of the pool to the bottom……with only the very center remaining liquid. As soon as the huge top section of ice melts that I can pull the cover out of the pool, we will probably see the damaged area. As yet we have no idea where it is. Possibly, when I get the cover out…… we may still need to wait for that ice to melt too. As yet, it hasn’t really started to melt under the cover too much. I looked today. It’s still frozen to the top…about ten inches on the wall thickness that is standing almost a third of the way around the perimeter of the pool.
Tomorrow evening……… a school play in Tannersville, on Saturday…
…… sugar maple gathering in Salem, New York…… at the farm where we buy our maple syrup year round. They invite the public for a demonstration of the sugar maple rendering process every spring, and this year… we’re going. It’s at The Dry Brook Sugar House, 432 Chambers Road, Salem, New York. After that…… Sunday will be a day of rest……… (we hope)

Thurs March 19th… Cold, rainy, lazy day in the brew…

This morning we awoke to a rainy, thirty six degree day of gloomy cloud cover. It is supposed to stop raining around noon and start to clear off a little…… in fact, by seven tonight, we should even see the sun, just before sunset. Tomorrow it will be back to sunny and clear as usual, in fact…… from now until next Friday, is to be sunny and no day is to be below forty-nine degrees. Some days it will get to fifty-two degrees. Tomorrow is the official beginning of spring, so lets hope that it gets here and stays here!
I would guess today will be a run and get it day for us. We need to pick up a few lengths of the plastic fiber style deck boards, made by Timbertec and a few other companies, so we can replace the top on our table out on the deck. It had a plywood top, which has gone bad, and everything else we’ve thought of to replace that top, will cost a fortune. We’ll put these on and it will be like a picnic table, but will never rot or warp. If it rains, just a wipe of a paper towel will dry it too, so we’ll probably go for those four twelve foot boards today, since it’s raining anyway. If we decide not do that today, I’m sure there are a zillion other things we can and should do.
Sometimes people ask how large our farm is and what it looks like, beyond the little bit, our pictures show. I tried to portray a larger scope in the pictures of yesterday, but still understand that it didn’t give a detailed look at the grounds etc., so as soon as the sun comes out tomorrow, I will walk around the nine acres and show other parts of the property so everyone will know what it looks like. Keep checking…………

Wed eve March 18th… Lots of pictures… cause a lot got done……

We hit the bricks early this morning!!! The insurance lady showed up at nine o’clock as scheduled, but I had a good hour out in the barn cleaning out the big chicken house before she arrived. Vick took care of all the insurance business and getting the pictures of the insurance lady’s dog so she can paint a watercolor picture for her and I stayed in the barn cleaning. When the lady left, Vick came out and became my tractor driver, so I didn’t have to shovel and jump on the tractor when the bucket was full. She did all of that…going to the manure pile and dumping the bucket, etc.
Once I completed the chicken coop, we went to the rabbit area and cleaned it completely too.
By then, it was noon and we took off for the Two Kids Bakery, where we had lunch. Upon returning, we rested for a bit, then went out and fed the critters a bit and we put a few more eggs into the incubator.
Now we’re ready for dinner and then we’ll put the birds away for the night. We snapped a bunch of pictures so everyone can see the farm at it’s best… at least it’s best today…… in a few more weeks it will get a lot more interesting when we get the Alpacas. Also, we have placed a down payment on the German Angora rabbits. Maybe six of them! Upon getting them…… and having the new bunny house built…… we’ll have all we need to breed our Angoras, to increase our herd. Harvesting the fur from rabbits living in their new warren, should help pay for that building addition and the rabbits in there in a year or two and if we get another male from somewhere, we can expand our herd quickly. They are a lot of work though, because you must brush them at least weekly to keep their fiber from felting (matting), so we will end up with a brushing area in the warren too. Well I promised pictures this evening, so enjoy. Sometimes our pictures are close-ups of the critters and you never see the farm. Today we made sure to show the animals and the farm. All the landscape you see belongs to us. Our animals never leave the property. (except when Timmy hears Tony, our neighbor from the city. When he’s up at his camp across the road from us, Timmy goes over, say’s hello and then comes home. I usually keep him in the barn if Tony is up here. Anyway, enjoy our spacious little farm.




Today's gathering













This little fellow is now in the incubator.....












Sweet Vicki surveying her domain.

We own beyond where you can see out there beyond the pond.

Outside duck run.

Old duck and chicken barn, viewing from rear deck.

Pupskill Lake Pond and woods beyond barns.

Inside the duck house

Another view inside the duck house. See their pictures on the wall?

Ducks in the duck pond.....They love it!

Phillip Pheasant strolling around the grounds.

Inside the brooding house. warming boxes, where the chicks go under heat lamps when they come out of the incubator. The larger sections are for them after about 5 weeks.

The actual incubators. The first one has the turner in it and the second one is actually where the egg spends the last three days..... completely still. The chicks will hatch in there.

roughly six hours after hatching, we will move the completely dried chick to the heat box, under the lamps.

Heat Boxes

Watching the ducks play and groom.

Old chicken barn.

Nesting area in old chicken barn.

Chickens in the outside run in the old chicken barn.

A Silver Laced Wyandotte

A Rhode Island Red.

Tina only has one tail feather left.

Chicken browsing at the rear of the barn. This is where the Angora rabbits go.

New chicken coop, outside run

Old barn

Temporary bunny warren

New chicken house nesting area.

Another view of the bunnies

The roosting spot

The Alpaca stable.... soon to be occupied.

The girls congregate in the Alpaca's hay.

A broad view of the farm, Vick and the animals.