Caiophora chuquitensis

The Caiophora chuquitensis plant at UConn is starting to produce salmon-orange flowers, about 4 cm in diameter. The blooms are nice, if not as extravagant as the flowers on some other members of the family Loasaceae. The plant reached maturity at only a year old from seed, which leads me to suspect that, like some other plants in the family that I've tried to grow, it is naturally short lived. I'll give it some extra fertilizer and try to keep it going for as long as possible.

Closeup of Caiophora chuquitensis leaf, showing trichomes.

Apart from intricately beautiful flowers, the family Loasaceae is known for its wicked stinging hairs. I've brushed up against the Caiophora once or twice, and it's not as bad as a bee sting, but more painful than stinging nettle. As with stinging nettle, the trichomes in the Loasaceae sometimes have cell walls impregnated with silica (glass, more or less), which break on contact and act like a hypodermic needle to inject toxins.

Maple Sugaring Wrap up

This year's maple syrup harvest; from left to right: week1-2, week 3, week 4, Red Maple syrup from week 1-2.

The sugaring season is officially over; I did my final boil on Monday and pulled out the taps. The last batch was quite dark, with quite a lot of sugar sand (a silty, bitter-tasting precipitate that needs to be filtered out). The local commercial sugar shack, River's Edge Sugar House, shut down its operations this past weekend. They had a relatively short, low-productivity season too, but made enough syrup to make the effort worthwhile. Apparently, they have vacuum systems on the sap lines in some of their larger sugarbushes, which enable them to harvest decent quantities of sap even when the weather is less than ideal. Vacuum or no, the weather forecast for the next 10 days doesn't even predict any frost, and the tree buds are swelling, making any further sugaring impossible.

My experiment with tapping a Red Maple (Acer rubrum) was kind of a flop; I can see why people generally don't bother with them. Sap flows were low compared to the Sugar Maples, and just about stopped towards the end on February, two weeks before the Sugar Maples quit. The final results for the Red Maple boil were 12 cups of sap to 0.25 cups of syrup, or about 50:1 (Sugar Maples yield something closer to a 40:1 sap to syrup ratio, though some sap runs were a little more watery this year).

It's time to start thinking about this summer's outdoor, vaguely-self-sufficiency-related project: beekeeping. I've acquired and assembled most of the hardware, taken the Eastern Connecticut Beekeeper's Association bee class, and my girlfriend has a couple of packages of bees on order from Anarchy Apiaries. The bees should arrive in early May, and I'll have some updates then.

Signs of Spring

The weather the past few weeks has been pretty poor for sap flow (mostly too warm at night), and even the good days, with nights in the teens and sunny days with temperatures well above freezing, have produced mediocre sap runs. There has been nothing even approaching the one-gallon-per-tap days that were pretty frequent last year. I've gotten a few cups of maple syrup by boiling down what little the trees have produced, but it's going to be a crumby year for sugaring.

The Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) has been up and blooming for a while now, in low soggy places in the neighborhood woods. Symplocarpus is always the first native plant to show signs of activity in late winter; the inflorescences famously produce their own internal heat, and sometimes melt their way up through a fair amount of ice and snow. It's a member of the family Araceae, like the Titan Arum, another "warm-blooded" plant. This photo was taken on leap day, when we had a little slushy snow.

Maple Sugaring Begins

On Saturday I got set up with the two Sugar Maples that I tapped last year, and the sap is now flowing. It hasn't been much so far, but the weather forecast for the next week is looking OK for sap runs. I'm going to try making syrup from a Red Maple this year, too. Red Maple sap is supposed to be lower in sugar content, and the season ends earlier, but I'm curious about what the resulting syrup will be like. Red Maples are also relatively common in my neighborhood, so if they yield a tasty product, it might be worth tapping more of them.

Maple Sugaring: 2012 Mayan Apocalypse-style

Sugar Maples, Eastern Hemlocks and others on a decidedly non-wintry Connecticut day a week ago.

Here in New England, the 2011-12 winter season is most likely going to be the warmest on record. We had a freak snowstorm just before Halloween, that knocked out the power for three days at my place, and for almost two weeks in some towns to the northwest of here (a combination of high winds and heavy wet snow that stuck to trees still in full leaf due to a warm autumn, caused catastrophic damage in wooded areas). For the next three months, and continuing this week, the weather seemed to get stuck in something similar to early April conditions, with just two brief winter-like cold snaps.

The Sugar Maples weathered the October storm just fine, being tough northern trees that tend to drop their leaves early, but I have no idea what sort of maple sugaring season to expect, if any, after such a balmy winter. The sap run doesn't seem to be starting early; we're just a week away from the traditional start and I don't see any of the usual signs like sap icicles dripping from broken maple twigs. Frigid night temperatures and a thick snow pack are some of the factors usually associated with good sugaring years, and we have neither of these things now. It doesn't look good for the 2012 maple syrup harvest, but the weather has been so far outside of normal experience that I don't think anyone knows for sure what's coming. I guess I'll clean up my tapping equipment, get it into the woods this weekend, and see what happens.