Archive for the ‘Backyard Ecology’ Category

Join us Wednesday, April 20, 6pm in celebration of Earth Week for a viewing of Dirt! The Movie. This movie is entertaining, informative, and very inspiring! Free and Open. Popcorn and Prizes!

Hi folks!

Call me sappy, but it’s true: One of my favorite signs of Spring is the sight of pewter-colored sap buckets hanging on the sides of old maple trees along a scenic muddy road in my native Vermont.

The photo above depicts an early American sugaring scene. Though many technical advancements have come into play, such as sap tubes, vacuum pumps, and reverse osmosis machines, key elements of this native scene are still prevalent in our modern sugaring experience.

The basics of sugaring are still the same:

• Tapping maple trees (although other trees have sugar-laden sap, maples are the sweetest and the sappiest)
• Hauling and collection of sap
• Boiling sap in a metal vessel (or do like the Abenakis and hollow out a log and supply it with fire-hot rocks to boil off the sap; or let the sap evaporate in the air until only sugar remains. For more Native American sugaring lore and history click here!)
• Maintaining a fire
• Gathering of community around syrup making

Those things are all still true. Go to any sugar house and you will see family and neighbors gathered around a sweet-smelling steaming boiler, usually being maintained by a core group of sleep-deprived people!

Here are the basic how-to’s for DIY maple syrup:

1. Find a maple tree at least 10″ in diameter
2. Number of taps depends on the size of the tree: 10″=1 tap; 18″=2 taps; 28″=3 taps, etc
3. Drill hole 1.5″ or 2″ deep. Try to drill above a big root or below a big branch, about waist-height without snow
4. Tap on the SE- or SW-facing side of tree first
5. Angle the hole upward so the sap flows down
6. Collect the sap and boil it down until it thickens into syrup

By the numbers:

• 40 gallons of sap=1 gallon of syrup
• Each tap can generally yield 5-15 gallons of sap
• Maple syrup has a boiling point of 7 degrees F above the bp of water; Therefore the syrup is done at 219 degrees F

Or you know what? You can skip the boiling if you’re short on time and fire and just collect it to sip or make sweet ice cubes.

Have fun!

-Holly Rae Taylor, Compost Maven

Hi folks,

The local food movement didn’t just materialize. Rather, our collective journey back to what pre-industrial cultures have always known about living in harmony with nature was blazed by lots of people and traditions, including Yankee ingenuity, Victory Gardens, Deep Ecology, A Sand County Almanac, Scott and Helen Nearing, hippie communes, the Shakers, All Creatures Great and Small, Walden, and the Whole Earth Catalog, just to name a few.

Add to this pantheon the work of Joan Gussow, who blazed a path for living in a connected way while in a traditionally disconnected environment. Joan Gussow has been writing about food policy and the relocalization of the food supply since the early 1970’s. In 2001 she wrote This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, just in time for the rest of us to catch up and hop on the local, slow food movement.

Here’s a great little video of Joan:

Joan Gussow Interview from Shelley Rogers on Vimeo.

Happy canning!
Holly Rae Taylor, Compost Maven

Martha Stewart in August, 1976. Photo by Susan Wood

Hi folks,

As if I needed one more reason to LOVE Martha Stewart, she recently had a tv show dedicated to raising backyard chickens.  Raising chickens is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint, save money, help your diet and food security, and add to your compost pile!

Turns out Martha’s been raising chickens for 30 years and even did a big magazine cover story about it back in 1994.  What can we say, she’s always ahead of her time because 16 years after that article Susan Orlean wrote her now-famous article in the New Yorker called The It Bird.  Susan caught hen fever at a county fair after she moved away from Manhattan.  It was fun watching Martha holding a conversation with Susan while a big hen napped on her lap.  And you should see Martha’s chicken coop: it’s imaculate for one thing, and looks not unlike a Hampton’s luxury beach house.

Here’s the link to that show, where you’ll find all kinds of useful tips for raising chickens and preparing eggs.  And check out www.mypetchicken.com for even more info about backyard chickens.

And remember, if you do decide to raise chickens in your backyard, all the pine shavings used in bedding your chicks make amazing compost!

In good tilth,

The Compost Maven

…