Poor people pay top dollar for depreciating assets

I've been thinking about writing this for some time, but always had a tough time deciding where to start. A to B to C, etc. I finally decided there is really no good place to start, but to start writing these as they come to me. Listen: I'm not saying I'm perfect. Far from it. Yet, I have made the appropriate decisions that keeps me on the path of making money and keeping (aka saving) more of what I earn. One of the big things that struck me is when I go purchase a vehicle, I look for a nice used one. Always. I've only purchased one new truck (1999 Ford Ranger) in my life, and I ran that one…

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Last boil of the 2019 Maple Season

The Maple sap has been down to 1% sugar content for the past week. This means that a whopping 86 gallons of sap is needed before you can get 1 gallon of maple syrup. Without a reverse osmosis setup, this type of ratio would be a waste of fuel and money. Last year, due to the low sugar content all year by the end of the season, people were giving away sap because they had run out of wood or got tired of paying for propane. Thankfully I only saw the 1% for a short week. Picked up 60 gallons out of my 50 taps on Thursday and boiled it down Friday. My make-shift sugar shack was gone so I…

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2019 Maple Season is Winding Down

Cheers to another poor, but a well produced season. While it may not be over yet, the 20 gallons of sap I pulled yesterday evening was only at 1% sugar. Two more days of sap run left and then nothing but warm weather both day and night forecast so the season will officially be over! I'm back to boiling outside. I will make a post on my ghetto sugar shack 2.0 and it's short lived life. Time to build a physical shack and build a container for my sap pan.

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2019 Maple Season Updates

Still not the best season. When looking at the log we can see that last year I pulled the taps, while this year we are only half way though at best. Grabbed another 20 gallons of sap today. Not great. Not horrible, but not great considering there is 50 taps total. The weather has been very cold for a long time. Now that it is starting to warm up and the sun is going higher, we are being hit with a lot of incoming storms, so low pressure (no sap run) followed by high winds (no sap run) so we take what little we get. The good news is that the sap is holding at 2% sugar. A little less…

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Farm to Table – Just a Saying?

Or can people really practice what they tell the rest of us to do? I've slowly been moving to purchasing local, fresh food and utilizing better menu planning. Yes, it costs more up front, but I wonder if I will save money over the long run? I started by purchasing a side of beef. Grass fed and grass finished, at a local-ish farm only a state away from me. Heartstonefarm.me I found them by looking on the internet for grass fed beef. Lots of places will sell you an expensive steak, but these folks were willing to sell 1/4 shares all the way up to the entire cow. I recently purchased a half share - or 170 lbs of beef…

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First 2019 Batch of Syrup

This is my official first batch of the 2019 season. 1.25 gallons of bottled grade A early season light. I decided to try a suggestion this year and bottle a few days after making it. This way I'm not tired and rushing trying to bottle while it is still hot. Instead, I just reheat it using an electric tea kettle. I set the temperature for 185 degrees and it is then at the perfect temperature where by I can just take my time and bottle it. Worked great!

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2019 Maple Syrup Season has Begun!

I'm running my newly converted and membrane updated reverse osmosis as we speak! I put out 50 buckets this year! I'm quickly leaning that 50 might have been a mistake. That's about 10 too many for me to go get and gather. The RO takes that much longer, etc, etc. Sap dripping from the tree I see from last year's log the season started 10 days earlier. It's much colder this season. Heck, it just snowed today. With my 50 taps I received 40 to 45 gallons of sap the first warm and and another 25 gallons of sap the next. While waiting on new filters for my RO, all my sap froze solid. Yeah, it's been challenging to say…

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