Archive | September 2016

Maple Syrup Season in September!

Sep12

OK, so it is not really maple syrup season but life is about rhythms and preparing. Maple syrup season is around the first part of February here in Missouri. In order to be ready when the weather warms during the day after freeing at night there is work to be done now! We are marking the trees with “danger tape” just before the leaves fall making them easier to identify and we are saving milk and juice containers to act as our sap jugs and order an extra set of Maple Spile Tap.

Danger Tape

Danger tape used to mark sugar maple trees.

Identifying Maple Trees
We moved to The Ridge on Halloween, so by the time we realized we had a healthy batch of maple trees to tap the leaves had already fallen. Identifying a maple tree (or any tree) in the winter months with no leave is definitely a step up skill, but not impossible. Most everyone knows what a maple leaf looks like, if not just search anything Canada and you will most likely see the image of the 5 pointed maple leaf. This time of year you can easily find the trees buy finding the leaves, either on the tree or on the ground around the tree.

Without the leaves on the tree you have two other things to look at, the bark and the upper level branches. On a maple tree (sugar maple specifically) the bark is grey to brown with deep ridges. Ours seem to have this thin layer of greenish grey moss that grows in the ridges making them stand out from other trees as you look through the woods.

Marked sugar maples

Sugar maple trees marked for easy identification during maple syrup season.


When looking up to the trees upper branches, a sugar maple will have the smaller branches growing directly opposite each other from a larger branch. This takes a little bit of time to learn to recognize looking up, but check out these details from the Cornell Sugar Maple Research and Extension Program

So get out there and find your trees while the leaves are still on and start saving or investing in equipment to collect and reduce the sap to syrup. See our bigger Maple Syrup How-to post for more details on making syrup.

In the meantime, comment below what projects you have going to prepare for the next season!

Chicks, man!

Sep9

So the plan was to hatch a few chicks while we had the extra eggs and prepare to replace our layers next spring.  Hatching them now means they should start laying in very early spring.  We had a broody hen, but she stopped when I tried to move her from the top nest box to a more chick-friendly lower nest box.  So time to break out the incubator.

 We have a styrofoam hova-bator incubator.  It is a still air model.  Past hatches have been horrible (both chicken and quail eggs) at less than 50% and an average about 30% have lead me to make changes.  First we bought an egg turner since it appeared that opening and closing the incubator to turn eggs three times a day was causing great fluxuations in both temperature and humidity.  While it was less work, hatch rates remained dismal.  Next it seemed the incubators with a fan were preferred as it insured the heat and humidity were more evenly dispersed.  Since our model didn’t have a fan, we could have bought a fan kit.  Since I am a computer geek, the many computer case fans I had laying around looked exactly like the ones in the kit.  I rigged one up and presto circulated air incubator, but again no real change in hatches.  

This time I did yet another internet search for ways to improve hatch rates with piss-poor incubators.  This is when I found a forum post about the “dry incubation method“.  It was worth a try since fully formed I hatched chicks described our problem.  Hoping for at least 10-15 chicks (allows for 50/50 pullets to cockerels) we collected 36 eggs over the course of seven days.  One other thing we learned was that the eggs need to be turned during this time of waiting to set in the incubator.

We removed the two red plugs per the article and used a room humidifier from when the kids were young which kept the humidity inside the incubator around 35% without adding any water inside.   In the past with water inside it stayed above  60%.  Fast forward 18 days, the turner was removed and a small amount of water added to boost humidity to around 70%.  The next day I heard chirping and saw a little egg movement.  Day 20 we added back one of the red plugs and waited.  By the end of the day at least two had hatched.  Then on the morning of the 21st day. The windows were fogged over, the humidity was at 90% and there were definitely more than two chicks.  The article said DONT open the incubator, okay we couldn’t take it any more.  30 out of 36 hatched right on schedule!!!!  What are we gonna do with 30 chickens???  

That is our best hatch ever!  Could be luck, could be the dry hatch method.  If the Beautiful Wife ever allows me to hatch chicks again, we will see if the method made the difference.

What are your hatch rates?  What things have you found help increase hatch rates?  Share your thoughts in the comments.