Tales from Sugarwood Farms

Saturday March 7, 2020

Beautiful sunny day, in contrast to the snow flurries of yesterday.

Busy day for everyone. The family project for this morning was emptying our refrigeration project off of Dale's trailer and into a reefer box. This allowed everybody to flex their muscles.

We pretty clearly exceeded the fire code in the camp tonight! But even the introverts admitted it was good to get out and see everyone.....we think we counted 36 at one point.

A quick run around the middle path by Adam, Cody, Amy and Kelsey, gathered about 160 gallons with Gerri driving and Evan dumping buckets. Bob started a fire as we grabbed this sap. This early pass was designed to get the evaporator running to ensure "we do not need to stay up until midnight".....hilarious to hear the 20 somethings say this but they are apparently getting tired.

We appreciated the help of Katie, Michael, Sadielynn, Wyatt, Ryan, Scott, Shana,Quinn, Bret Megan, Molly, Erin, Curt, Tinleigh, Dave G. , Muff, Michelle, Nathan, Emmalene, Elias, Simon, and Drew. We had so many people we made a one bucket rule for gathering buckets. Dave M and Cheryl stopped in as did Dale and Karen and Mark and Susan.

Five hundred and eighty gallons (plus 24 from Adam's route) was our grand total tonight. This is a guess. Late night crowd voted unanimously that not knowing exactly was the fault of Curtis.

We were happy to have the Bishop family with us this evening. Sadly, they were in town for the funeral of Sylvia Bishop....our heart felt condolences to them. We also apologize to Drew, who flew in from San Francisco and we offered him a pair of size 10 boots...while a pair of 14's sat on the other side of the camp...he had to be extracted from them!! Lee would have enjoyed this !!

Michelle offered to take the aluminum cans off our hands for a fundraiser in Maryland. Brad noted that they felt better about finishing their drinks they were helping a charity.

Fun fact....Nathan knows a little Japanese...turns out the writing on Walle says Marooka Rubber Track 800...we have have had some fun guessing what those words say..did try to "google it" without much sucess.....turned out pretty exotic stuff....haha!!

Elias is not afraid of heights, for the sake of everyone's nerves...did not crop out Brad's hand holding the log at 90 degrees!

Nathan and Michelle extracting a boot Simon lost in the mud! (His boots came off easier than Uncle Drew's)

Amy, with her able assistants Susan, Erin and Kelsey made a lot of grilled Italian sandwiches on the blackstone on the back patio. Pretty sure we ate far more tonight with the dessert buffet than we worked off.

Kelsey commented to Cody at 0800 today (they started expressing sibling love early today)...that he was NUTS for making marshmallows by hand...but she seemed to appreciate them 12 hours later!

Evan worked on the perfect browning technique.

One wrong move and that is mine!!

The kids ran at top speed in the dark around the camp playing hide and seek. Dave G. listened to the Buckeye Central BB game on the radio followed by some pleasantly strange music that Dave seems to know well. Bob passed out samples of syrup. Brad tapped a walnut tree...he wants to be clear on purpose....so he passed out some samples of his experimental sap. Scott explained to Cody that he might want to take some wood splitting notes from Brad and Adam ...and he retorted that he just needed better quality wood.