Sweet Stuff

The stoves have been blazing this past month boiling down fresh maple sap and turning it into delicious syrup. Though with so many seedlings to water and seeds yet to sow, distracting Jamie's watchful eye from overseeing the boiling, much of our sap turned itself into maple butter and not syrup. But it's so completely delicious we are not complaining. Also delighting my sweet tooth are the  freshly dug parsnip which stayed buried in the ground over the winter, miraculously without rotting, and were dug up the other week as soon as the ground was soft enough. I have never tasted any vegetable so sweet and we don't seem to be able to pass a day without parsnip featuring in some shape or form on the table: roasted, in soup, in patties, bread.. cake....! We've got 4 new chickens who delivered lots of eggs in time for Easter despite attempts by Eddie and Bertie to get uncomfortably up close and personal. With spring in the air we had a much needed enormous bonfire to clean up junk ready for new stuff. The snow has gone revealing our bare fields and with them the realisation of all that work ahead of us. But with all the little seedlings sprouting up, looking green and bright, we can't help but feel excited.