Small Farm and Homestead

 It's mid-April here in southern Michigan which means syrup season is usually over.  Most of the birds have migrated back, and the frogs chirp at night.  Most of the days have gotten warmer and the buds and even starts of leaves have started growing on trees, all of these are definite signs the syrup season is over.   My Experience      For most of my life, my family has made Maple Syrup as a hobby.  For about 4 years in my early 30's my brother and I made it commercially.  Together we had about 8,000 taps.  Mine were mostly roadside trees, while his were all on a vacuum system.  I  preferred doing roadsides as I would get huge maple trees which would warm up quickly in the full sun and run all day long because of their size.  I used 15-gallon barrels to collect my maple sap so that I could keep up during a good run without losing too much of the tree sap.  I enjoyed the challenge of making the syrup commercially, but, it was too much work and it had become for stress than joy.

My whole life I have been around farming and raising livestock for food.  I have always enjoyed raising animals, riding horses, and having pets.  But, the one thing I never enjoyed was when it came down to killing them.  I still can't say it's my favorite, but, it is a necessary part of eating an animal.  I would cringe when it came to be my job to cut off the heads of chickens or to shoot a hog or cow. But, I loved the thought of being self-sufficient!       I always thought that being able to provide for yourself when it came to food was an awesome thing.  When I was around 9 years old we got our first rabbits.  We had 2 does and a buck and let them loose in an old 10x10 chicken coop we had.  From there those 3 rabbits quickly became 30 and we moved our operation to a much bigger barn.  We had a client come and he would buy every rabbit we had for $3 a piece!  We were rich!  I always wanted to butcher the rabbits but, couldn't bring myself to the killing part.        Fast