Sap harvest 2022 is over. We collected our last sap on May 7th. Harvest lasted a good 20 days but proved to be an unpredictable and lower production season. How can we explain? It really is a lesson in the fact that not everything can be easily explained. The sap ran erratically, starting in many…
As 2021 draws to a close I find that I seek sustenance from the earth and the beauty of our natural world, and from the company of family and friends. It is an unsettling time, but the most important thing is to remember our shared humanity and our mutual need for sustenance and comfort. Our…
In Alaska the snow is finally melting, and the sap has started to run in the birches. If you are in a northern clime, get out of the house and tap a few birch trees! Drink that sap! It’s the perfect spring tonic – full of electrolytes, minerals, and micro-nutrients. This is a rewarding activity…
Sap happened early this year – in fact, the earliest ever in our 30 years of tapping birches in Alaska. Yes, it’s our 30th Anniversary! It’s hard to believe it’s been that long since deciding, all those years ago on the homestead, that it was a concept worthy of investment and a way to…
Harvest 2018 has come to an end. We collected 123,000 gallons of sap and made 1,100 gallons of syrup in 22 days. It was a wet, cool season with abundant snow on the ground. This makes for a very high quality sap and syrup. Our crew is out in the woods pulling 11,000 taps and…
The sap is running and so are we! Sap appeared in Talkeetna area birches starting on April 9th. It will take our crew of seven hard workers four long, strenuous days to tap 10,500 birches. We just hauled in our first 1600 gallons of beautiful, clear sap! That means it’s going to get noisy around…
Our spring tree tapping will soon be underway–we have 10,500 trees to tap. We expect the sap to start flowing any day! Our crew has been out in the woods since early March preparing for the upcoming harvest. There is more daylight every day, and the nighttime temperatures are slowly creeping up. Most of the…
2015 was the earliest, longest, and slowest harvest on record for us. After a record warm March, we started collecting sap on April 4th. We finished May 5th after 28 harvest days and a few days shut down due to freezing temperatures. We struggled a bit with our vacuum and gravity lines this year, as…
A bit of time has gone by … while our 2013 harvest was late (starting May 3rd) with a long, cold spring, our 2014 harvest started right smack on the average start date of April 21st. It ended abruptly on May 7th, a short 16 days later. This year’s harvest ended about the time our…
3/31/13 Another season in the woods near Talkeetna is starting! Dylan, India, and Josh arrived early to help install tubing to another 1500 trees. It’s a challenge – a combination of physics, design, art, intuition … they would probably come up with a couple of other descriptions! The rest of the crew arrives this week,…
