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.

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:

• BYO carpool
• Kids welcome
• Arrive as early as you like on Saturday (A few of us will have spent Friday night at a friend’s cabin nearby and will get the fire going early.)
• Stay as long or as short as you like, there’s no featured moment, just lots of time for
  • Gathering and cutting wood
  • Stoking the fire
  • Ladling the sap
  • Boiling, boiling, boiling
  • Walks in the woods
  • looking for/at (harmless) snow fleas, AKA Springtails
  • Talks about non-violent revolution, living on a fragile, quaking land, appropriate technology, Transition Town, etc.
• BYO bag lunch
• Sap-sweetened tea and cocoa provided
• Bring a Quart jar for your portion of almost-finished syrup
• Chili supper around 5PM. Bring cold food to potluck-supplement the chili, like bread, cheese & fruit. (If you think you’ll join us for chili, we’d like to know, for estimating quantity.)
• Stay as late as you like. (Those going back to sleep in the cabin will probably bank the fire at 9:PM
• Probably more boiling on Sunday, but less predictable and therefore not “officially announced.”

Directions to Sandhill can be found here.

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

(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.

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.

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

1. Bring sturdy warm clothing – you will be dealing with scratchy bushes and the terrain may be uneven, so be prepared – work gloves are needed and eye protection is recommended. Shoes with ankle support are good. Layering is helpful: you’ll likely be down to your shirt sleeves after some heavy work!
2. Bring pruning saws & shears or clippers if you have them. We’ll have weed wrenches and extras of most equipment.
3. Big cans (larger than soup-can size) are helpful for putting over cut ends of plants too big up uproot.
4. (This is not a child-friendly event. We are glad to see children under 16, but if you bring them you should think of this as your educational event for them, where you will be attending to them at all times.)
5. Bring a dish to supplement Curran’s chili for lunch. Hot drinks will be available.
6. Bring your own drinking water bottle.
7. Starting time is 10:00 AM, lunch about 1:00 PM. Quitting time is about 4:30 PM or whatever earlier time you choose, or it when gets too dark or cold to continue!!!

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:

• relocating the maple-syruping boil-down area to a more convenient location.
• Setting up a deer exclosure to protect white pine seedlings.

? – A September “Alone and Together” Retreat?

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.

2 – Planning for Buckthorn Busting, Monday Evening, 10/5

At Cynthia and Ralph’s, 7PM – 9PM

3 – Buckthorn Busting, Saturday, Nov. 14

Location still to be arranged, most likely in the Cannon Valley, not far from Northfield.

4 – Early Winter Harvest, Saturday, December 12

At Sandhill

A New Approach

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:

• Maple Syruping, end of March/early April.
• NYM Sessions, Memorial day weekend — Saturday Campfire, Forest Friends Board Meeting.
• Summer camping weekend at Sandhill, July or August (after the height of the tick season).
• Hopefully, an annual personal-time/community-time overnight retreat.
• Buckthorn removal Saturday. Traditionally on the land of someone we know in the Cannon Valley, South of the Twin Cities.
• Early Winter Harvest, second weekend in December, at Sandhill.

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.

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 be ready for the great Maple Syrup Boil-Down Family Day on Saturday March 28.

We will follow the general plan outlined here.

Here are this year’s variations for Saturday (updated last on 3/18/09):

• No carpool-gathering point this year. Hopefully you can find an old-timer you know who is going.
•  Veggie Chili will be served Saturday, 5:00-5:30. Bring a cold-food potluck supplement (like bread/apples/cheese) if you plan to stay for this supper.
• BYO bag lunch
• Sap-sweetened tea and cocoa provided
• The privacy-screened, kid-friendly Porta-Potti will be there.
• Remember your quart jar.

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!