Welcome friends..it's been a while since I have had a chance to catch y'all up on what's happening over here at the farmhouse...
Today we are coming at you from Finding Home Farms sugar-house.
I have blogged about them before a few years ago. You can catch up on them HERE.
Tapping maples trees is something that a lot of people in the northeast do, but Dana at Finding Home does it in abundance. With thousands of trees tapped, they have some of the yummiest maple syrup around! (our family buys this syrup all the time for our home use and we bring it camping each trip!)
The day was a little overcast, but not too bad, if you were properly dressed. We invited two other homeschool families (you will probably recognize them from other trips) to join us on our adventure at the maple sugar farm.
Their new facility is sooo pretty and on point with the surroundings.
We started right outside the sugar house with a lesson on tapping and the process that the tree goes through each season. LOTS of questions were being thrown at Dana at once, but he was great to answer them all! We had a chance to taste the sap running from this tree and surprisingly to us, it was like sweet water. Inside the sugar house the water is separated from the sap as part of the maple syrup making process.
After we saw the process of what the farm does (modern process) we went back in time and Dana let the kids tap the tree the "old fashion way". Each person had a try at screwing in the drill. It was amazing how fast the sap dripped out from the tree. We found out that it does not hurt the tree at all and the tree actually heals itself during the spring and summer months.
Then we ventured inside to warm up by the cozy fireplace and Laura offered us a maple syrup shot to taste the fruit of their labor.
If you look carefully at the picture of the bar above, you will see little dark holes in the wood on the bar, they are actual tap holes from those trees when it was alive. Cool conversation piece for sure!
After that we took an in depth tour of the rest of the beautiful facility. It smelled sooo good...I equated it to Willy Wonka's Factory in there.
Dana and Laura and their staff were very gracious to us, answering all our questions and even let us use the building to eat our lunch and work on some worksheets about the process. (#homeschoolerstakeover)
So proud of how our children behaved, the questions they asked and how much fun we all had!
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