It has been an action packed weekend at the farm.  We are again cooking maple sap into syrup.  On Friday we pulled the taps out of the trees, since the weather is warming and we are already up to our eyeballs in sap.  Maple syrup is our traditional first harvest of the year.
  

We also pulled up the parsnips.  They grew last summer and fall, and have been in the ground all winter.  Supposedly this makes them sweeter, and spring ground thaw is the traditional time to harvest them.  They are certainly sweet!  We sliced a few up to eat raw along with our lunch of venison sausage, pancakes with homemade maple syrup, and blueberries we picked last summer.  What a feast!

     

After lunch Jim and Thea the beekeepers showed up.  Sadly, all of their honeybees died over the winter.  They came to collect the hives and clean them out in preparation for a new batch of bees they’ve ordered.  The unexpected benefit to us humans is that the bees died before eating much of their winter stores of honey.  So Jim and Thea gave us some of the honey still in the comb.

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