Homesteading Adventure #12 - Maple Syrup & New Eggs

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It's been a while since our last update.

It appears we tapped our trees a little late. After just a day and a half, the sap quit running. The best time to collect sap is when it gets above freezing during the day, but freezes at night. Starting the second night after we tapped, the nights stayed warm, thus killing the collecting. We did end up collecting 5 gallons of sap in that short time. As it usually takes 50 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of sap, you can imagine, we didn't yield much syrup. It took us about 24 hours total to boil down the small about we collected and we were able to can up just one pint of syrup. But, Oh My, it was sooo worth it!. Since Mrs. Butterworths is not a welcome guest in this home, I have been buying pure maple syrup from the grocery store for a few years now.
Our syrup tastes a thousand times better than anything I've purchased. I swear to you, I actually licked the pot after I'd scraped it clean. It's like liquid gold!

We got another 2 dozen eggs from Valerie, my chicken friend, on the 21st. I just had to give incubating one more try this year. We candled tonight and ALL of them are developing! I'm keeping our incubator a little warmer this time around. 102* instead of 99.5*. Apparently in a still air incubator, the temperature should be hotter. I'm also vowing to really sit on my hands this time and I will NOT be opening the incubator for any reason once we go into Lockdown. Even our 6 year old homesteader knew better than to break the rules. I should have listened to her....
It's funny. This hatch is going by so much more quickly. And we aren't nearly as obsessed about checking temperature and humidity. I guess we're a little more seasoned now with a hatch under our belts. This will be our last hatch this year. I'd like to hatch one bunch each year to keep our flock young...and for the fun of it, of course.

Also, while we were at Valerie's, Jeremy decided we needed another 4 chicks. So we have 9 chickens in the brooder. Which, by the way, has been relocated from the bathroom to the basement. The chicks are so fun to watch! We've already made predictions which ones are roosters based on their demeanor. They are also really feathering out. A few of them even have cute little tails starting. I'll have to take some pictures of them. They have officially made it to the homely stage. It's almost laughable how silly they look half feathered and still half fluff.

Stay tuned....I promise homely chick pictures soon!