Celebrating Spring With a New Coat of Paint

Spring has arrived! It's official, and I am loving it. Projects that had been put off till warmer weather are in full swing. One of those big projects was to get the barn painted...red. Deciding on the color of the barns on our farm was a big decision and since the neighbors barns are all black we decided to go with red.

 Thanks to our Grandma for letting us tear down the old tobacco barn to build a new barn here on Growing Boys Farm. While it was a lot of work tearing down an old barn, building the barn out of reclaimed wood was very gratifying and I have to say seeing it painted bright red the same as the old family tobacco barn is nice too.

 

While painting an entire barn is not exactly an easy project it is very rewarding in the end to see this huge building all painted. And...one perk to painting a barn is no tarps or drops cloths are necessary, you can be as messy as needed. Yes our clothes, hair, shoes, and sunglasses all bare the tale-tell spatter of red paint which happens to be oil based and hard to remove.

I think the cows are enjoying the new paint job as well or maybe they were just happy to have their heads buried in the hay rack.

 

 

 

 

Waffles anyone?

Delicious waffles are the breakfast of choice these days at Growing Boys Farm.

 

It's maple syrup time again! The trees have been tapped and the sap is running like crazy.

Between a round with the flu and then another round of sub zero temperatures it wasn't easy this year to find time to tap our Maple trees but a friend put a bug in my ear about a new way to boil down the sap. Remember last year when we boiled over a big open pit? That was great for the growing boys to play in and see how many sticks they could catch on fire and it was great for roasting marshmallows but it was not great plan for boiling sap. The ash tends to fly up and land in the sap pans which makes the syrup have a distinctly smoked flavor which doesn't go well with pancakes. This year we decided to try boiling down the sap on our wood heating stove. We like to keep a steamer on the stove because our house gets so dry in the winter and we thought the sap boiling down would just replace our steamer for a few weeks. It turns out that the process is a little slow but works beautifully and since we already need the fire for heat we aren't wasting any extra fuel. For us it's a great deal.

So far we have just over a gallon of syrup and the growing boys goal is to make enough syrup to last us all year on those delicious waffles.

When it takes so long to make it you use your syrup a little more sparingly then if you bought it at the store but that's probably a good thing too. Do you have maple trees? Why not tap one and see what you get?