stepping out on the road

The next book came (along with five "new" to me ones!), but now I have to re-read it.  Because back in the day, it was one that I didn't read carefully but somehow almost absorbed? I don't know.  Anyway, I'm reading The One -Straw Revolution.

This is the cover that came.

 

This cover one would be the tattoo. 

A new project for us is syruping! There is a new job that I like pretty well so far, and a guy there, who is the son of someone I know from my last two jobs and actually my very first job too, has been a chef (among other things) and seems pretty nice and competent so I gave him some feta because I figured he could appreciate it.  In return, he gave me a pint of maple syrup he'd boiled down.

Wow. The flavor.  So obviously, we can do this, right? And this friend mentions offhand, "I've read of people tapping black walnuts." And in the husband's research into this potential project, he also runs into this possibility, and the description that it tastes like maple syrup with butternut flavoring. Well heck.

So we got some spiles, read a few things, decided gallon jugs would work fine for collectors, and just happened to tap a walnut before we tapped a maple. And in that decided that this year we'd tap walnuts, process the sap, see what we learn, ID trees for next year, collect supplies, and see what we decide to do with it,

The first tap. Overnight we got a gallon from this one. Completely clear.  Looks like water. We tapped a few more today. That gallon is on the woodstove. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.

Another adventure begins!