Hiking for a purpose!

Paving the path to a new project generally requires some research, planning, and legwork – usually figuratively, sometime literally. While today I have nothing tangible to show you for our efforts, however come mid-winter we will be producing our own maple syrup. So excited and can’t wait to be collecting sap and cooking up our first ever batch. Well, except for the whole getting out in the freezing cold to do it, but we just bought new winter clothes to try and keep old man winter at bay.  Not that it broke my heart to do some shopping, especially from Duluth Trading. 

We spent the weekend hiking up and down steep hills with our noses in the air looking at the quickly falling leaves on our and the in-laws 65+ acres for maple trees to mark. While some people are quite good at distinguishing between a tulip poplar and a maple by their bark this couple is NOT. Show me the leaves and I can tell you ever time, but as tends to happen in the fall the leaves are disappearing quite quickly. To me it seems the taller the tree the more leaves are currently missing. Hence our noses in the air looking at the two leaves that always seemed to be at the very top with a pair of binoculars. Binoculars we didn’t have to foresight to bring on our first day out. Live and learn, right? Good news we have found several groups of maples on the property (and a really cool mushroom colony on a dead tree), so many in fact we ran out of marking tape, and are going to have to make a run to get more and go back out on this lovely fall day to finish marking. Oh poor me. Now this legwork may sound awful to some, but to steal a line from Little BEST DAY E V E R! We ended our day finding the granddad of a maple tree right behind our house, totally physically spent, but in the best spirits. No better way to spend the weekend than with your love, surrounded by God’s creation, prepping for our first major homesteading MAKER project. Can’t wait to see this story unfold!