It’s been a busy week and it’s only Tuesday. We have been trying to make more items around the house to cut costs and increase the quality. As some of you may know we make our own maple syrup by tapping our trees, boiling it down and finishing it.
Making maple syrup is a labor of love if you do it on a smaller scale over an open fire. Currently, we have three trees tapped with eight 5 gallon buckets. These buckets are filling about every thee day so on Sunday we decided it was time boil.
The weather was good so I cracked open a crowler and my neighbor came over for a beer while I boiled. It took about 5 hours but we needed up with some more beautiful bottles!
Monday we had to go grocery shopping and we saw a local store running a deal on strawberries so we decided it was time to restock our jam supply. We finished the last of our jam a couple weeks ago. We had a big batch of summer blackberries that last is a few months. We did all the cutting last night and decided to cook down the strawberries while we cooked dinner today.
Making jam is even easier than syrup. Pretty much it just involves adding sugar to strawberries and cooking that down. Once soft blend it, add pectin and then filter out the seeds. Once that’s done hot fill the glass jar and cook them in boiling water for 10 mins. It’s easier than it sounds not to mention the jam is way better than store bought.
We have a bunch of more stuff to complete on our list so we will see how much more we can compete this week. We still need to make sour dough bread, beer and make more jerky. I never thought of ourselves as homesteaders, but with how much stuff we make I guess you classify us as such since we are trying to reduce our needs in store and grow our own food.
I love the idea of how you make your own maple syrup, and I love the bottles you used to store them. Anyway, I remember making a strawberry jam back in high school, but I guess I am not into it that much.
We are getting into making more things as a hobby. We are starting sour dough and I have a beer batch planned.
The alcohol percentage is not high right?
of the Beer or syrup? The beer was a 5% IPA that I drank while making the maple syrup.
Aahaan Inflation is increasing on the daily basis and it's become very hard to survive, Glad to see you are making this things in your house to cut the cost. This is what we all need to do to reduce the cost. I'm truly impressed, the Syrup (juice) looks very fresh which you are holding in your hand.
Funny part is it's more costly than buying from the store at the scale we are doing. I think out quality is better and we could probably scale it so one day it's cheaper.
I can understand, Scalability will make easier for you to make it on cheaper cost, but Quality does matter on quantity ;)
Maple syrup is great to make. It's a lot of work but worth it. Having it on pancake is so tasty !
It's a ton of work between collecting, spitting wood and actually boiling it down.
Growing your own stuff is the best, I don't have land but have been looking at hydroponics lately, with food shortage and logistics problems world wide grown your food is becoming way more convenient than before, jam looks great
We have a hydroponics in the kitchen and in our greenhouse.It's a very good way to grow.
You should check out @ericvancewalton's posts if you haven't yet. He has been working on a sourdough starter for a bit now. The syrup looks great. My buddy taps his trees north of where I live. My mom used to make the best strawberry jelly. She hasn't in a while though. I have another friend who is a pretty big homesteader. He cans everything!
I have not I just gave him a follow. We are most likely going to do our starter this weekend. I'll need some tips from @ericvancewalton We have been doing maple syrup for a few years it's way better then the store bought stuff. We have been finding a lot of the stuff we make is better so I guess you can say we are heading down that lifestyle.
Yeah, homemade is often much better. I'm actually one of those weirdos that likes fake maple syrup more than the real stuff. When I was a kid we went to the New England states and every gas station in Vermont and New Hampshire we stopped at had these maple candies. Those kind of ruined it for me.
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Very cool. I’d love to try making my own maple syrup. You got some deep amber ones, my favorite.
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