Maple Magic Day

Today was a day that is a perfect example of why I love living in Natick.  Maple Magic Day!  Natick has it's own community farm.  In the early spring they put out sugar pails on the sugar maple trees all around town.  Then they have a big pancake breakfast and let you tour around the farm, where you can see all sorts of animals and they give demonstrations on how maple syrup is made.

Morty had swimming lessons this morning, so we didn't actually make it to the breakfast, but we definitely went over and checked out the farm.

Here's Morty in the barn where they had a bunch of the buckets.  I think they just started collecting a couple weeks ago.  Also inside the barn was a sleeping pregnant pig.  I didn't get a picture of that, but Morty liked it when I made piggy noises.

Here's a picture with one of the pails on a sugar maple.  Sap is only 2 - 2.5% sugar.  Apparently when it freezes, the sugar goes to the bottom, and the ice can just be taken off the top, which makes the rest of the evaporation process much faster..

They had a few demonstrations on how people historically did sugaring.  Here is one of the guides telling us about how the Native Americans sugared.  They would heat up stones in a hot fire and then put the stones in the hollowed out tree (bottom left) to release steam.  It was kinda nice to sit by the fire for a while and listen to the stories.  As you can see in the pictures, there's still a lot of snow around, but luckily today was in the high 40s to low 50s.

Morty started getting a little bit tired...

And here's a picture of him in front of the "modern" sugar shack.

In addition to the sugaring tours, we also got to see a variety of animals.  Bunnies, goats, cows, hens, lambs...