Maple Tapping

Here you see a group of trees tapped and buckets hanging from each tapping.  Small trees that a man can put his arms around take 1 tap.  The bigger the tree gets the more taps they can use without hurting the tree.  They use up to 5 taps on the biggest trees.

Sap runs in the trees when temperatures are freezing at night and warm (40 degrees) in the daytime.  It is, of course, gravity flow.  If they have trees on a hill or slope, they use plastic tubing to catch the sap.  They have a holding tank at the bottom of the hill/slope and all the sap runs down the tree, into the plastic tubing and travels down to the holding tank.  They keep a close watch on the holding tank because if the saps runs quickly and gets ahead of them, it will overflow…..what a mess. 

If you look closely, you can see the plastic tubing running between the sugar maples.  Notice the holding tank almost center picture near the bottom of the hill.  I can’t remember how many gallons it holds, but it’s amazing how much sap they collect.  Each tap yields approximately 10 gallons of sap a year.  That 10 gallons of sap will boil down to about 1 quart of pure maple syrup.

Here is Mr Everson in the “sugar house”.  That’s what they call the place where they boil down the sap into pure maple syrup.  The boiling tank is 16 feet by 6 feet and is heated by a wood fire in the chamber below the tank.  They use wood from their own maple farm and heat the tank of sap to 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. 

They weren't “boiling” the day we went.  It was too cold to gather enough sap to boil.  But, they put a small fire in the chamber to show us how it works.  They have wood stacked and ready to burn.  They cut wood all year long except in July and August when the “deer flies and black flies own the forests” (Can’t wait for that time of year here). 

Here’s Elder Poulson and Elder Sing in the Maple Farm store.

In the store they turn some of their syrup into candy, maple covered peanuts, maple fluff (a cotton candy made from spun maple) and our favorite, maple crème.  The maple crème is like whipped butter/honey, but it is pure maple syrup processed to spread on pancakes, etc.

Maple Farms

A group of senior missionaries took a tour of a nearby Maple Farm last Friday afternoon.  As we drove around the last 2 or 3 weeks, we've seen small “family maple farms”.  There might be a dozen or two sugar maple trees with buckets hanging from them.  Fun sights in this part of the world.  The farm we visited however, is 80 acres of sugar maple trees.  Trees of different sizes take one to 5 taps per tree.  A tree needs to be 40 years old before it is large enough to tap.  They have between 3 and 4,000 taps each year.  They use mostly buckets hanging from the trees, but you will see some that use plastic tubing.  They boil down the sap to a 1 part water/3 parts sugar syrup and sell the maple syrup in several sizes.  Gallon size is $40.

Here’s the entrance to the Everson Maple Store where we gathered for the tour.

The tour is on and Elder Poulson and I took up the rear to get some good pictures.

A New Friend

We have been fellowshipping a “golden investigator” for about 2 months now.  She has been taught by 2 young missionary sisters and attending our Canandaigua Ward.  I have been drawn to her because she reminds me so much of our daughter-in-law, Becky.  This investigator’s name is Rebeca Reyes…our daughter-in-law, before she married our son was Rebecca Reyes.  Our Becky joined the church when she was just a couple of years younger than Rebeca is .  Both girls were raised Catholic and converted in their young adult years.  Takes me back and I’ve loved getting to know this new Rebeca in my life.  Yesterday Rebeca was baptized and she asked me to give the talk on the Holy Ghost at her baptism.  Today, Sunday, she was confirmed and Elder Poulson stood in and participated in that.  It was a great!   Here’s some pictures.

Here’s Rebeca with “her” missionaries.  They are Sister Hatch and Sister Killen.  Sister Hatch goes home this month and we will really miss her.  Sister Killen has only been here a couple of months, but we love her too.  We work with amazing young women.  They have surely been reserved for these last days.  Have no worries, “they’ve got this”.

Here we are after the baptism with Rebeca Reyes.

Pete's Sculptures

I had a birthday, again.  Boy do they keep coming faster and faster.  Anyway, the office administrator (Sherie) at work and her husband (Pete) have become good friends of ours and Elder Poulson has helped them a bunch in remodeling their home.  I guess I should take pictures of their beautiful new bathroom and spa area in their bedroom and show off Elder Poulson’s great work.  But, what I meant to be telling you is that for my birthday Pete who is a welder by profession, made me this bug.  I hate bugs, but I love this one.  Isn’t he just so cute.  What shall I name him?

Here’s another one of Pete’s sculptures he gave us awhile back.  He makes these things out of scraps he gets from work.  These rounded rectangles are called slugs.  So maybe the bug should be “slug bug”.  Haven’t named the frog yet either.  Pete also makes life-size turtles from these slugs, sets them in his yard and they “weather” and look beautiful. 

Mission Statement

Every time the missionaries meet for “Site Meeting” every Wednesday evening and “Zone” meetings, we recite one or sometime all of three mission statements for our mission.  I’ve decided to make posters of each of them for our apartment.  Here’s my first attempt at my favorite one.