pickling plus shuggr'n

We've been fermenting various foods lately in our new collection of crocks, two company-made in Zanesville, OH, and the nicest of the set hand-thrown by our friend Jordan and coated in a homemade glaze made using wood ash from his woodstove. Our pickling experiments have included sauerkraut, beets, turnips, rutabagas, and now crock dill pickles!

The dill pickle recipe is really simple: place a few cloves of chopped garlic, dill, and sliced cucumbers in a crock, filling it halfway to three-fourths full. Sometimes I add some turmeric for health and color. Mix up some brine (about 5 tablespoons to a quart and a half of water for a one gallon crock) and pour it over the pile. Place some sort of weight over this, allowing the water to cover the cucumbers, cover with a lid, and wait a few days. Dill pickles!

Unfortunately, Western North Carolina doesn't have the amazing quantity of maple trees that cover the Northeast (and at least as far west as Ohio). But, we do have plenty of other deciduous trees that flow sap in the same way, though not in the same quantity, as the glorious Sugar Maple. Some examples that we do have plenty of are Tulip Poplar, Black Walnut, Beech, and the Sugar Maple's estranged brother, Box Elder, which isn't known for having much of a practical use to people as it's too light for firewood, lacks structural strength, and the grain is pretty bland to look at...but as we found out from a cut box elder that the electric company decided was in their way, the sap tastes quite maple-y.

So, since we still like our tree-based sugars, we decided to try out tapping what we do have. We started with two Tulip Poplars, plenty big for at least one tap each. I made the spouts from sumac branches since they are naturally hollow in the center once you remove the pith, a spongy orange foamy substance. They were carved to have a taper, so they would hold into the tree, and then were pounded gently into holes we drilled with a brace and bit. We then hung old (washed!) milk jugs on the spouts, and now we get to wait.


The next step, should we successfully get some sap from these trees, is to boil down the sap into syrup or sugar. It's no small process, as even with the high sugar content of maple trees it takes around 40 gallons of sap to yield one gallon of syrup! Our yields will probably be even less...but we'll see!

Hello friends,


We took a journey. It looked like this:









The advent of our homesteading endeavors, herein documented. Finding a place, beekeeping, gardening, building, learning, sharing, etc!

josh + beth