Maple Syrup Season

With the end of freezing temperatures overnight, maple syrup season here has ended, but of course that means it's time to go out and buy our supply for the coming year.  (Though at the rate I'm using it, our supply will be gone by summer!).  We headed for the Kemble Maple Syrup Tour, just northwest of Owen Sound.  This is the only operation we visited and by far the largest of the seven farms that were involved.  We knew this one is wheelchair accessible.

Have you ever seen a sugar shack this large?  The main building holds the evaporator, while the new part on the left holds collecting tanks for the sap.  The windows mark the final bottling area and store.  This farmer taps 6000 trees, and attempts to make a full-time income from 200 acres of sugar bush.

You might think of maple syrup season in March and April, but the hard part actually starts the year before with firewood cutting.   Here they trim out the Ironwood to manage the bush for greater sap production in the future.

In this operation, the wood is all chipped and stored under cover a full year in advance so it dries out.

The chips are dumped in this old wagon and drop into that pipe leading into the sugar shack.

The chips drop down the chute and are fed into the firebox by this auger.  So there goes your image of the farmer tossing pieces of firewood into the firebox - still the normal way to do it, but here they're trying to mechanize everywhere they can.

There are two huge pipes to vent the steam, and one for the smoke from the fire.  The fire simply boils the water in the sap, while the syrup gets ever more concentrated.

The other side of the operation is the collection of sap in the bush.  All big operations now use plastic piping, larger and larger as it nears the sugar shack.  This farm has a pump below ground level, pulling the sap in and pumping it to the collecting tanks.  Spigots are all pulled out now, and will be put in again (in a new spot) next February, another big task, necessitating all the family help they can get.  The snow is likely to be 3 feet deep, so that work is done on snowshoes.

Before the sap moves to the boiler, it goes through this reverse osmosis machine which removes up to 75% of the water, greatly speeding up the process of boiling.

A sequence of operations alongside the big evaporator is used to finish the syrup, which is a very exacting process.  Temperature is critical, and in our experience with a home scale operation years ago, you've got about ten seconds to mark the difference between perfect syrup and burnt pots!
 

You can see the tap where the syrup is drawn off the finishing pan directly into the food grade oil drum.  This farmer stores his syrup in the drums and only draws off what will normally sell in any given week.  They show up at about 6 farmer's markets in the region to sell it.  They normally get about 60 barrels, but this year got 79 - it was a very good year!

And this is the final product.  We bought a two litre jug and were very happy with our visit.  All the photos in this post date from 2016, since iphone's "live view" messed up my photos this year!

Progress on Home Care

Seven months after getting home, we feel we have finally arranged the home care we want.  What a relief! We tried all the options, and hope the one we chose will work out for us.

I think I mentioned we were pursuing the 'Family Managed' option, where they give you the money and you hire your own home care.  But the further I got into it, the more I saw the disadvantages.  And then two agencies offered to provide coverage seven days a week, morning and evening.

That was enough to change our minds.  So we will get morning care from the V.O.N., and evening care from Care Partners.  That leaves us to work at getting consistent and appropriate times from these folks.  I'll let you know how it goes.

And now we're off to remodel a bathroom.

A Few Spring Birds

In spite of Live View, here are a few of the birds we've had around recently.  Some of these are returning migrants who mark the coming of spring; others are headed further north.  One has been here all winter, but has dramatically changed colour!

Live View doesn't work too badly for this American Robin.  It gives those two or three short hops at the beginning of the picture.

This goldfinch has changed its colour from drab olive green to bright yellow.

And this Downy Woodpecker is drumming on trees for a few short weeks as a substitute for having a melodious call.

The Slate-coloured Junco is a year-round resident here, but many of them head further north to nest.

We saw this Great Blue Heron on a drive that ended up going through a marsh on Saturday, but it would have been a much better picture if cropped somewhat.  Live View won't let me do that.

One day a House Finch stopped at the feeder.  Originally a bird of the western U.S., the map in Peterson's field guide indicates that it was released in New York City in 1940 and is "spreading explosively".

These are the Common Red Polls, who nest far to the north along the shores of Hudson Bay and further.  But the photo illustrates two problems.  First there is virtually no contrast that lets you see the birds compared to the grass and snow in the background.  Secondly, Live View does not help fix this problem at all because there is no room to crop the photo and focus on one or two birds.

In the meantime, I have turned off 'Live View' and hope I never encounter it again!

Notre Dame

I can't help but pay homage tonight to Notre Dame Cathedral, the 400 firefighters trying to save at least the stone framework of the building, and to France for whom Notre Dame is such a central symbol.  At 850 years old, it was one of the most iconic medieval cathedrals in the world.  We've only been to Paris once, and we did not go inside the church, but we walked through the plaza outside and admired it.  Any building that could stand that long deserves a lot of admiration.

Notre Dame is located on the Isle de la Cite, in the Seine River, facing northwest.  This the front facade where you line up to enter the church, with its two huge square towers.  As I write this, the news is saying that at least one of these towers is on fire, while firefighters work to save the other.

I found the east end of the cathedral to be more interesting architecturally, with the numerous flying buttresses and the tall pointed spire, now collapsed.  You can just see one of the three rose windows, this one the south one, on the left side of the building.  It appears that the entire roof has burned and collapsed, the wooden beams from the 12th century presumably tinder-dry.  The spire dates from the restoration of the mid-1800's.

This picture, from one of the bridges over the Seine shows a bit more of the context, the river itself and the solid collection of locks padlocked to the railings.  You get a better view of the flying buttresses here too.  All of France will be mourning the loss of this great symbol.  Our hearts go out to them.

Live View Does It Again

Unknowingly, I discover I had switched on 'Live View' on my iphone camera.  Essentially 'Live View creates a quick 2 second video out of your photo - the most distracting, useless camera setting I have ever encountered!  Among other things it changes the photo size to small, and prevents you from cropping it, something I do fairly often.

As you can see it also forces me to load the photo as a video, which is a damn nuisance!  I the video works, you'll also see that the weather was as bad as ther camera!  We did not need more snow!

Inglis Falls Part II

I was surprised at some of your comments yesterday, saying you enjoyed the pictures with railings in them.  Going back over the post it opened my eyes to a whole new creative perspective.  Never-the-less, let me finish my train of thought because there are a number of other limitations in the way of photographing Inglis Falls.

There are three viewpoints for photographing the falls.  The first, a viewing platform that avoids going down any steps, may be accessible, but you are looking through the trees at a partial view of the falls.  I could not even get here last week, because there was a sharp foot deep drop in the gravel pathway.

The lower viewpoints require quite a few steps, and in the third case, hopping over some boulders.  These are the sorts of viewpoints I will simply not be able to access.  Thank goodness I already have some hundreds of waterfall pictures around here, like the above two.

I can also focus a bit on the history of these waterfalls.  Almost all of them at one time had a mill pond and mill.  It was a different era!

Wheelchair Photography

I'm now starting to adapt my photography to see what i can do sitting in a wheelchair.  There are a number of limitations.  My favourite big Nikon camera is too heavy to hold and I'm always limited to taking pictures at eye height while sitting in the wheelchair.  My body is still a bit of a 'bobble-head', so it's hard to sit still while holding a camera too. We stopped at Inglis Falls earlier this week, and it quickly illustrated to me the trouble I'm going to have getting waterfall pictures.

There's a nice millpond above the falls, held back by a small dam that enabled them to direct the water through a flume to the mill.  Trails follow both sides of the pond, but certainly not wheelchair accessible.

Right beside me was the small dam, with some old rusted gears above the entrance to the flume, enabling control of the water flow.

Three different railings interfered with my picture of the dam.  I hadn't thought of railings as a limitation.

Looking out to the brink of the falls the railing interfered again.

But my assistant photographer, Mrs. F.G., quickly stepped up and got a shot from above railing height.

On the other hand, the painting of the mill, mounted high on an outside wall, was no problem.  The two views show the mill from above the falls (the large view), and from below the falls (the smaller view).  More tomorrow.