Today is the day, to take the first step!
Here on the farm, the sun is shining and it feels like Spring, we don’t even have to pretend this week!
It’s hard to believe we are now approaching the 1 year anniversary of the first round of shutdown mandates.
This unexpected pause in the momentum of our day-to-day lives helped us re-prioritize the passion projects at the bottom of our to-do lists.
For over 10 years, we’ve wanted to get bees for the farm. Each year we say this is the year, and then before you know it, the window of opportunity has passed us by and it gets pushed down the list.
This winter we made it a priority:
“2021 was going to be the year we get bee hives on the farm!”
A few months of Zoom beekeeping classes later and our first two hives are officially ready for their new inhabitants.
It’s unusually cold in Florida for this time of year so the bees won’t be coming up until sometime in Mid-May.
By then the alpacas will be sheared and we will be able to devote some time to our new buzzing Italian bee friends.
With a late jump start due to the weather, we won’t be expecting the hives to be established enough to harvest honey until later this year.
That’s OK with us, as we’ve also checked off another thing on our 10 year old list of things to do around the farm!
We have these amazing clusters of silver maple trees around our property that we’ve wanted to tap and make our own Maple Syrup for ALMOST as long as we wanted to keep bees.
Following our new motto of there is no better time than the present to try something new, we’ve been taking advantage of this time to successfully tap the maples and make some of our own Maple Syrup!
With the still below freezing nights and warm sunny days, the maple sap is flowing to the point where we are interchanging our collection buckets halfway through the day.
This is a good thing, since we didn’t know going into this that it takes roughly 40 gallons of maple sap to produce just 1 gallon of Maple Syrup!
Although our first round of honey is still months away, and that’s if everything goes to plan, we should have plenty of Maple Syrup to hold us over.
In the meantime, our goal is to continue to prioritize the things we have been meaning to try around the farm.
Along with beekeeping and maple syrup making, 2021 is the year we start implementing silvopasture practices with our alpaca herd, plant those apple and pear trees, and experiment with vertical trellis gardening.
They say the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the 2nd best time is today.
The last year has taught us, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, and we don’t know what the future will bring.
So dust off that list of passion projects and carve out a little space for you to take the first step.
We look forward to keeping you all in the loop with our new projects and hope you find some inspiration to jump-start some of your own!