The Tea Room Opens: March 21st!

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We've not been regular in logging over the past few weeks. The main reason is that both the cold and the snow meant that most of our work was mundane. In fact, we've been entirely focused on the opening of the Tea Room this next weekend. This has meant cleaning, resurfacing the Tea Room kitchen floors, taking in new inventory, and even moving in new equipment.

Getting ready for a lot of canning...a long awaited glass container shipment

Re-surfacing the kitchen floors...it's amazing the wear and tear on a professional kitchen

All of this activity was necessary since we have decided to open the Tea Room for its new season: March 21st (that is this coming Saturday!).

This week however, we were also very pleased to see the day time temperatures climbing back to above 0 Celsius.  This meant we could finally return to working on the farm. Our priority of course was the Maple syrup.

Although we do not have many trees, we produce enough of the syrup for the Tea Room and our market. Our few trees are all Sugar Maple and their sap is intensely sweet, producing a very high quality syrup. So it was clearly time to get back to our trees.

The rather painful and exhausting first trip to the Maple trees

Now we've already started the evaporation process and look forward to producing a lot more of our clotted cream, maple fudge.

Starting the evaporation process....soon our first  2015 batch of Maple syrup will be ready.

The thaw has also given us the opportunity to start on this year's major project: Phase 2 of the barn renovations.

In the back of our barn, we have an ancient dilapidated structure where we house a lot of our equipment. We will be taking this down and refinishing the walls of the barn and the interior lower floor. In order to do this, we need an implement building somewhere out of the way, yet convenient enough to be accessible year-round.

We decided to build this small structure down the farm not too far away from our "Beaver pond" and next to our Kiwi rows. This week, the beginnings of the foundation were finally started.

The first step to our barn renovation...a new implement building.

We'll end this week's blog with our latest wildlife pic. We've not seen them much this Winter, but we were really glad when a small herd of deer visited us one morning. Truly Spring is on its way.

The deer are back...Spring is on its way!