HollyHedge Keeps Growing

We started this growing season with good planning and pretty good luck. The spring rains were plentiful, often teetering on excessive. Despite some loss to wetness, we still managed a good harvest.

The spring garden was planted with leeks, peas... turnips & cabbages... & fennel... all ending up in the kitchen & on plates. In addition, this year we also experimented with onion sets, spinach & arugula.

Crowns of asparagus planted 2 years prior, offered their first delicious spears in May (asparagus requires a year or two to get established before harvesting). Our summer plantings, however, encountered quite the set back. Although fending off the critters is an annual struggle, this year was a particularly disheartening one. Cat birds feasted on blueberries despite our netting. Groundhogs & rabbits devoured our peas despite our fences & row cover. Pumpkins, squash, beans, broccoli raab, broccoli & parsley fell victim. Even hot pepper plants felt the sharp tooth of the hungry rodent. This certainly reinforced the idea that a diverse garden improves the chances of a successful garden.
While blueberries were eaten, our raspberry crop was beautiful. Though we haven't a single pumpkin plant left, the tomatoes have once again yielded more than the chefs could imagine. Even the cucumbers managed to inundate out baskets for a few weeks. Garlic continues to prove to be unpalatable to our garden fauna. Many herbs also seem to harbor those essential oils that rabbits just don't care for. And as of now, we have a promising apple crop hanging in the orchard.
Much of our summer successes also heavily relied upon our watering system; the rains didn't seem to frequent us as much as they did in the spring. Saying it was dry is an understatement. Each year, we seek to manage & refine our watering system, striving for efficiency and resourcefulness. Negotiating an irrigation system is plenty of work, and involves maintaining a balance between what is coming out of the ground and what is going back into the ground.

Ben finds himself watering each bed as it is needed & having the sustainable resource at hand to do so. We like to keep in mind that, in a way, the water the garden demands is the same water that offers showers at the inn, washes dishes after a wedding, or simply quenches our thirst.
Though on hot dry days, dragging water lines around is nothing short of hard work, we rejoice in what the sun offers. This July, our solar panels have provided our biggest solar output to date & we've just harvested grapes that thrive under abundant sun.

Maple Sugaring

Maple sugaring commenced early this year at HollyHedge. After having taken a year off to make sure the trees were healthy, we, quite coincidentally, decided to start when we were almost out of syrup, literally down to the last bottle from two years ago. We had also been taking note of the temperature dipping below freezing at night & staying above freezing during the day... ideal conditions for collecting.

So on a sunny February afternoon, we set forth with our bundle of tools...

...and for three weeks thereafter collected the sap daily. Though the sap flow started off slowly, day-time temperatures climbed and yields increased. Sap flow peaked in late February with a steady run that was producing around 10 gallons of sap a day from our 8 trees. While this video surely doesn't capture the excitement we felt during our daily collections ("How much will there be today?!"), it does show the slow but steady way trees deliver their sap.

After a little over 3 weeks, we had collected a total of 84 gallons of crystal clear sap.

It was time to get cooking but this time, with all the knowledge we had gained from two years before. We chose a quiet day and took advantage of the big range that was usually used for feeding hungry guests. With 6 burners and two LARGE shallow pots, we were evaporating faster than we could have imagined, transforming crystal clear sap into brilliant gold syrup.

Although still a lengthy process, we had cut cooking time down by more than half & ended up with a beautiful reward for our efforts, a subtle, fragrant, soul-warming maple syrup.

Then time for the final test, pancakes.

Maple sugaring is a tradition available to few geographical ranges where sugar maples grow. While this is only our second time maple sugaring, much joy was taken by the simple process of repeating what can be an annual event, a seasonal joy only available during a time when it seems spring will never come.