Saturday April 2, 2011 found 15 of us on the land sawing, stoking & simmering sap.
(Or simply spectating.)
You can download a dozen photos from the day, Mary’s PowerPoint Slides & Text, an introduction to tapping & boiling (3.8 Megabytes)
No sign of snow fleas this year.
Found some sunburn!
Directions to Sandhill can be found here.
Quaker Community Forest lives!
The trees are tapped. (Thanks, Cynthia, Ralph & Brian)
The sap flows (Thank you, Mother)
The tanks fill… (Tanks)
And a boil-down is being planned for Saturday, April 2.
Save the date and watch the skies.
Plans are not yet firm, and probably will stay soft until after NYM Exe Committee meeting 3/19.
We think it will have many aspects of recent years:
Directions to Sandhill can be found here.
The day before 12/12: the snow has piled up and there’s more on the way.
Storm, late Saturday AM
10-20 inches in western Wisconsin by Sunday morning.
If the roads were open enough to get to the “driveway,” we’d still have to walk in half a mile from the road.
And, the National Weather Service forecast for the Sandhill area:
Sunday: … Mostly sunny and cold, with a high near 4. Wind chill values between -15 and -23. North northwest wind between 14 and 18 mph, with gusts as high as 26 mph.
Not safe to go a-harvesting.
We honor Mother Earth/Gaia by recognizing that we very powerful humans are still puny in the face of a winter storm.
We do not struggle and rail against our limitations. (Sigh.)
We accept.
May you all have a nice place to snuggle, and good friends to snuggle with,
Ralph, Cynthia, Richard
As we have done for a decade, The second weekend in December we will caravan out to our land North of Menominee, Wisconsin to welcome winter and the holiday season, with
Harvesting boughs, and jack pine trees for Christmas-yule-tide…
Gathering firewood for those who can use it… (donations accepted)…
Tromping about, celebrating the weather of the upper Midwest!
(With global climate change, the feisty jack pine may become endangered in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but not yet!)
(Snow sports? With some snow, there’s nice cross-country skiing through mixed forest & prairie environments, and there’s a little downhill sledding.)
Check out the re-growth from the “three acres of logging for tax-breaks” that happened in 2004.
Hot cider.
Call Cynthia Bartoo, 651-647-0758, for more information and car-pooling connections. (It’s about a 90 minute drive from the Twin Cities.)
Directions
As usual, we’ll gather at Ralph and Cynthia’s to form carpools.
9:30AM, Sunday, December 12.
They live in St. Paul at 2126 Roblyn Ave.
(Roblyn runs parallel to Marshall, three blocks north. They are in the 1st block East of Cretin, a bit east of the Lake Street bridge.)
We’ll pack ourselves and our gear into as few cars as possible and depart for Sandhill at 9:45.
Bring a hand saw if you have one. And loppers. We will have extras. Bring your own lunch. We’ll have a stove, cider and tea.
The leap from frozen, snow-covered ground to almost-balmy weather in just a few days has resulted in a pathetic sap yield from our 20 maple trees at Sandhill this year. There’s hardly anything to boil; we’ll be lucky to get a cup of syrup.
Therefore, there will not be a maple-syrup boil-down this year.
We will pull the taps this Saturday and start thinking about a summer camping trip at Sandhill.
Alas!
Sure is nice to have it warm, though.
We’ll be gathering on Sandhill, 40 acres owned by Cynthia Bartoo and Ralph Jacobson, north of Menominee, Wisconsin. Join us anytime between 11AM & 3PM. Harvest quirky Jack Pines for Xmas trees or cut yourself some yule boughs or firewood.
Donations accepted.
Or get away on a tromp through woods and prairie.
And help prepare for next spring’s maple syruping, in a new location, closer to the road. We have mostly completed an improved firebox
(no more smoke in the eyes!).
We still need to get the chimney up and to drag the 100-gallon tank down and establish it in its new location.)
Kid friendly: Hot cider & warming tipi available on site.
Call Cynthia Bartoo for more information, maps and car-pooling connections. If you think you might come, please let her know. This is because we are uncertain enough about the weather that we want to know how many to prepare for, especially children, and also how long we should stay out there, to welcome latecomers. Cynthia will have information, maps and car-pooling connections. (It’s about a 90 minute drive from the Twin Cities.)
If you are carpooling with us, arrive at Ralph and Cynthia’s at 8:30. We’ll pack ourselves and our gear into as few cars as possible and Depart for Sandhill at 8:45.
If you come, but don’t carpool, here are directions.
Bring a hand saw if you have one. And loppers. We will have extras.
Bring your own lunch. We’ll have a stove, cider and tea.
For the ninth year in a row Quaker Community Foresters will be doing buckthorn removal. Here’s what it looked like in 2006.
This year we will gather at the home of Merv and Joy (Suzanne) Curran, about 10 miles west of Northfield.
Here are some instructions for the day
Cynthia Bartoo is coordinating rides for Twin Cities folks. Please contact her if you are planning to come, even if you will go on your own. We would like to know how many people are coming. We will gather to carpool at Cynthia and Ralph’s house, 8:30 AM, leaving about 8:45. We’ll leave maps inside the front porch door for anyone who arrives late.
COME HAVE A GREAT, FOCUSED, OUTDOOR DAY WITH QUAKER FRIENDS FROM SEVERAL AREA MEETINGS.
Directions:
Click, below, to get a map of the area.
So far Cynthia and Ralph and several of their out of town descendants (offspring, spouses & grand kids) & Richard are going out for Saturday and Sunday nights.
Others are welcome to join us for one or both nights, or just a day. Please reach Cynthia, whose contact information is just below.
There will likely be a swimming outing to the Hay River, plus the usual cooking, eating and tromping around.
Two projects we hope to work on:
Last year a few of us spent a night and a day at Frank and Raquel’s cabin near Pine City, with lightly-structured time, apart and together. The effort was to let the natural setting recharge us, reorient us, revivify us. It worked well enough that we want to try it again.
Let Cynthia know if you are interested in something like this, and what September overnight date(s) you would have available.
At Cynthia and Ralph’s, 7PM – 9PM
Location still to be arranged, most likely in the Cannon Valley, not far from Northfield.
At Sandhill
Cynthia, Ralph & Richard met on July 19 to consider our recent lapse of focus on the every-other-month face-to-face planning meetings.
Two things came out of this discussion:
1. At our current level of activity, it doesn’t make sense to have regular “whether-we-need-them-or-not” meetings. We will call meetings to plan our regular outings, or when there is some other specific reason to have a meeting.
2. We want to continue our regular outings:
Beyond the regular outings, we are deciding to go into “coast” mode, rather than aspiring to build Quaker Community Forest to include more than these regular activities.
We agreed we are in this for the long haul and if, at present, our other commitments mean we don’t have extra energy to give to QCF, then we will do only what we love – our regular outings, listed above.These are popular every year, with just the basic publicity, through the usual channels. They nourish us, so we’ll keep doing them.
Of course we hope that over time more and more people will discover how much these outings can provide needed spiritual sustenance, but we no longer plan to make extra effort to recruit people to other possible events, like the mid-winter events that have not panned out the past couple of years.
We accept that we are in “basic group maintenance mode,” and we are happy with what we’ve got.
As our lives change for the less busy 
we may find we have the energy to do more, but that is for another time, yet to come.
Three people (& three dogs) tapped the trees on March 8.
We cleaned out the 100 gallon tank, 
(click on the image to see it full size)
got it level, and steady to be filled to the brim. 
We drilled the tapping holes, 
and connected the trees to the tank with hundreds of feet of tubing. 
A week later, the sap started running while Ralph was there tapping other trees that drip into five-gallon jugs.
We will follow the general plan outlined here.
Here are this year’s variations for Saturday (updated last on 3/18/09):
Directions to the event are here.
We will also be there most of the day Sunday 3/29. We’d be glad to see you. Maybe you can stay to help us pack up!
