Maple Syrup Farm

Today we got to go to a maple farm about 40 minutes from our home. We got to take our new car too! Well, okay, it's new to us. It reminds me of my high school days of driving my stick shift '95 Geo Prism.
This seems to be a great little car and gets twice the miles per gallon of gas (a huge saver since gas is at $3.95 now) as the Tribute. So now instead of 15 mpg (and that's on a good tank of gas), we'll be getting 30. Oh yeah, so it's a 2003 Ford Focus and does not have AC (never came with it), so we'll see how much I choose to actually drive this over the Tribute in the summer, but for now I'm having fun with the manual transmission. Got it for $2000. Now we will be selling the beastly Ford F150. YAY!

 So, we got to the farm, which was really like driving to someone's house out in the country (because it was so "homie" feeling) without designated parking spots. We learned a lot about tapping maple trees for sap. They actually don't put buckets under like you might imagine. It's more sophisticated than that at this farm where they have 1291 trees pumping over 300 gallons of sap per hour. They use piping that is similar to Pex Pipe, but is made specifically for maple tapping and is UV resistant. It takes about 43 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. That's a lot of boiling down! I really wish I would have brought by camera! And I didn't even think to take any pictures till we were driving away. There were hundreds of free range chickens running around. Tristen had a hay day chasing them all over. My goodness did that place wreak of poop! They also had a couple other older dogs that Tristen adored. I really really want to get a middle to large size dog for him to wrestle with because poor Loki takes a lot of abuse from this little boy... and Loki could use a friend.
Anyway....
So, of course they sold syrup at this farm as well as chicken eggs and other treats made from maple. They had a couple tables outside with these treats on them. I was looking the treats over and Kalvin was standing next to me bashfully following me around as I pondered buying a package of maple candies. Then I heard Kalvin whisper, "Mom, what are those? You should ask them (as in the family farm workers) if they are chicken poop or candies!"
We bought some to see and they tasted sweet to me!