The Hens
In 2015 I made the decision to begin keeping chickens and purchased my first six chicks in early 2016. Our plan was to work up to a small flock that would supply us and a few others with fresh eggs. Within a few months the scales fell from my eyes, and I was drawn into the intricate world of chickens, and visions of a rainbow of egg colors and a wildly diverse flock began dancing in my head.
Since my first dalliance into brown egg layers I have added hens that lay white, pale green, olive green, light tan, and deep brown speckled eggs. The illusive blue egg has not yet been added due to discovery of a rooster in the bunch and the untimely death of a sweet Amaraucana. I currently have fifteen hens with five more due to arrive in early April.
And yes…they all have names.
Hinkel, the Lakeshore Egger 
Phoebe, our Golden Campine
Maple Syrup
We have a host of maple trees in our 15 or so acres of woods, so of course we naively decided that it would be a snap to start making maple syrup. Once again we were in for lots of big surprises about necessary equipment, time, and manpower. But our ignorance has made for some blissful memories, and we now look forward to the tapping, collecting, boiling, bottling, and sharing of our liquid gold every spring.
Our operation has grown from a tiny shack with a homemade stove and a few dozen buckets to a spacious shack with state of the art stove, automatic draw-off, and canner. We now use tubing to collect and move the sap to our holding tanks and a vacuum pump to assist in sap collection. We have our eyes on adding a reverse osmosis system in the future to decrease the amount of time needed to boil the sap.
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