GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: “urban homesteading”

Tap Maple Trees to Make Maple Syrup How To – GF Video

Tapping maple trees to make maple syrup in this DIY video. We tap our Sugar Maple trees to collect sap in preparation for making maple syrup. This is a DIY low tech low volume method of tapping some trees in your yard or perhaps a neighbor’s field. Several of my neighbor’s have sugar shacks complete with large evaporators and huge piles of firewood, some use traditional sap buckets to collect sap, others use plastic lines and taps.

For my yard, I went with plastic taps and lines, they are not expensive, and I used the food grade plastic buckets from my homebrew beer kit to collect the sap. After we collected the sap, we boiled it down, and we’ll post a video about that soon.

The general rule of how many taps to put in a tree, according to the Conn. DEP is 1 tap for a 12″ diameter tree ( 38″ in circumference ), 2 taps for 18″ diameter or larger tree ( 56″ in circumference )

The holes you drill for the taps should be 1.5″ deep with a 5/16″ bit. If you are tapping trees that were tapped previously, pay attention to the previous tap holes. New taps should be 6″ left or right of an old tap hole, and 12″ above or below the old tap hole.

Sugar Maple sap needs to be stored at 38F degrees or cooler, ideally you will boil the sap the day you collect it. If the sap has turned milky and foamy, it has gone bad.

Do you tap sugar maple trees? What are some tips you can share with us below? Thanks for watching!

Here is the tree identification book we like to use:

Buy From An Indie Bookstore Here
Buy From Amazon Here

April 16, 2012
Maple Syrup Season Update GF Radio

Eric talks with Bill of Maple Knoll Farm about tapping Maple Trees for sap, making maple syrup, and how this warm winter is affecting the maple syrup season. Bill can be seen in our GF Video Make Maple Syrup here. Bill has about 150 trees tapped, using metal buckets. He and his family collect the maple sap, and boil it down in the evaporator in the family sugar shack. This warm winter weather has thrown a wrench in the usual maple syrup making process. Sap runs in sugar maple trees when the nights are cold and the days are warm. This year we’ve had just warm weather for the most part.

In the sugar shack, Bill and his family fire up the evaporator and boil down the sugar maple sap to syrup. Its very cool process to watch. There are several maple syrup operations in our town, and we visited another one recently and made this how to make maple syrup video there. Each sugar shack is different, reflecting the interior design sense of each sap house owner.

Some additional maple syrup posts on Gardenfork:

How to make Maple Syrup at Bill’s Sugar Shack

How to tap sugar maple trees

How to make maple syrup at the Norfolk sugar shack

Summer Salad with Maple Blue Cheese

photo by earl53

February 27, 2012
Sugar Cake Recipe Winter Beekeeping 101 Video
Here’s a video on how to make sugar cakes to feed your bees in winter. Overwintering your honeybees is challenge, here is one way I help the bees overwinter, feeding them sugar cakes with this recipe. You can make these at home. I use foil pans you can buy at the grocery store.

Note: I know use the dry sugar aka Mountain Camp method of providing sugar to honeybees in the winter. Watch our dry sugar Mountain Camp video here.

The sugar cake recipe:
- put 5 pounds of sugar in a large mixing bowl
- add 7.5 ounces of water
- add a teaspoon or two of essential oil mix if you choose
- mix together and then spread out in a 9×13 or similar foil pan
- allow to dry overnight
- take off the inner cover of the hive
- carefully turn the cake upside down onto a thin plastic or wood board
- slide the sugarcake onto the top of the hive, and either put on either a shim or an insulated inner cover, and then the outer cover.
Here are some photos of how to make sugar cakes for bees.

You can add a homemade honeybee essential oil mix to the sugar cake recipe, you can see the essential oil recipe here. Update: I know buy the pre-mixed essential oil mix, its not that expensive and saves time.

To put these cakes on top of your hive, you must use a spacer – shim, or an insulated inner cover.

There are many opinions on how to get your bees through the winter, this is one way we make sure our honeybees have enough food to get through the winter. What I like about sugarcakes is that the cakes absorb moisture in the hive, which reduces or prevents condensation in the hive.

Many beekeeping books say you should open the hives only when it is 45-50F, but I’ve found if you act quickly, you can pop the top of the hive to slide in sugarcakes when the temperature is in the 30s. Obviously you aren’t going to do a hive inspection at 30F, but you have a few seconds to open the inner cover an add sugar above the supers.

Again, I think the dry sugar method is much better now, check it out here.

Do you use sugar in your hives in winter? let us know below:

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February 18, 2012
How to make homemade pasta GF TV Video

Home made pasta, aka fresh pasta, we show you how to make a home made pasta recipe in the GF cooking video. Pasta from scratch is not hard, there’s just a few steps to get it right. Homemade pasta tastes different from store bought pasta, and when you make it yourself, there are infinite variations possible. neat.

There’s a good chance you have a pasta machine in the basement, an xmas gift from a while back that you never got to, so you’ve got the equipment. If you don’t have a pasta machine, check out these pasta machines
or the links at the bottom of this article.

My technique for making home made pasta is based on a method Jamie Oliver shows us in his book, Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook
– a book I really like, BTW.

Home Made Pasta Recipe ©2012 Eric Rochow

100 Grams all purpose or Italian “OO” flour

1 egg

For homemade pasta, you can use either all purpose flour or an italian flour labeled “OO”, i believe its a finer grind flour, but if you can’t find it, all purpose flour works fine.

The ratio that I’ve found works best is 100 grams of flour to 1 egg. If you are making fresh pasta for 4 people, I’ve found 300 grams of flour and 3 eggs works well.

Put the flour and eggs in a food processor, and pulse until the flour comes together and looks like small pebbles.

Dump the pasta dough mixture onto a floured board, and collect the flour into a ball.

Now knead the dough by stretching the dough out and folding it over on itself. Its best to watch our how to video to see this. Knead for 5-8 minutes

The dough is kneaded when you press your finger lightly into the dough and the dough fills out the dimple you’ve made again, the dough bounces back.

Shape the dough into a rectangle, wrap in plastic wrap, and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes, longer is better.

Take the dough out of the fridge and cut into square pieces about 3″ x 3″, 3/4″ thick. how many pieces you will have depends on how much flour and eggs you mixed together.

Take one of the dough squares and run it through your pasta machine at its widest width. Fold the dough back over on itself in thirds, like folding a letter into an envelope.

You will now run the dough through each width setting on the machine, holding the dough so the folds are on the sides. You may need to flour the dough when rolling it through the machine to keep it from sticking.

After you have run the dough through the machine at its smallest width, take the dough and fold it back on itself until it is about 4″ wide or so, you want a width that is small enough so you can run the dough through the machine again.

Run the dough the machine again, starting at the widest width and progressing through to the narrowest setting. Note: some machines have a real narrow final width, you may not want to get the dough that thin, it depends on what kind of pasta you want to make, and how thick you want it to be.

You can cut the dough in half if it gets too difficult to work with. And you can flour the dough as needed.

You are now ready to run the pasta dough through the die cutters to make various kinds of pasta, or you can hand cut it on a board, or you can make ravioli with the dough. I’ve found it works best to let the pasta dough rest under a towel for 10 minutes or longer before running it through the pasta cutters, you may need to flour the dough again, you want it quite dry.

The flour you use for dusting can be whole wheat or semolina or just regular flour. I’ve used whole wheat thinking it gives a bit of a nutty taste to the pasta, but maybe i’m just fooling myself.

Once you cut your pasta, you can drop it into boiling water or let it dry on a dowel or broomstick set between two chairs. Fresh pasta can take 3 minutes to cook, or 8 minutes, it all depends, you’ll have to keep an eye on it.

February 10, 2012
How to Chainsaw Tree Logs

Here Eric shows you how to use a chainsaw to cut up tree logs into firewood. Keep in mind Eric is not a professional lumberjack, just your average DIY guy who likes to use his chainsaw to cut down trees, and cut the logs to fireplace length. Use this information at your own risk. Always follow all the safety instructions that came with your chainsaw.

Proper placement of the chainsaw relative to your body, especially your legs and feet is real important here. Think about how the chainsaw may slip down, or up and what part of your body it may hit, which would be a bad thing. What may seem like a comfortable position to hold the saw, especially while you are kneeling to cut up trees, may not be the best way to do something. Steel toed boots are a must have when cutting firewood.

A sharp chainsaw chain is mandatory, if your chainsaw is spitting out fine sawdust while cutting, its time to switch out the chain with a sharp one. A sharp chain makes large wood shavings when its cutting, not fine wood dust.

You can watch all our how to cut down a tree chainsaw videos here
Do you have some chainsaw adventures to share? or some more safety tips on the proper use of a chainsaw? please let us know below

June 23, 2011
How To Make Maple Syrup at a Sugar Shack: GF Video

Ever wondered how to make maple syrup? I have a number of friends who have sugar shacks and boil down sugar maple sap to make maple syrup. Last weekend I visited one of my friends and made this video about how to make maple syrup.

You can also use simpler methods than the one shown here with the 2 stage evaporator, I plan on tapping my sugar maples next year and making maple syrup in with a simple propane burner and stainless steel steam table tray that will be my evaporator.

Do you make your own maple syrup? How do you make it? and any tips and tricks you can offer us here? Let us know below

March 18, 2011
Drip Irrigation System with Soaker Hose – GF Video

I use this homemade DIY drip irrigation system with soaker hose for my raised vegetable beds. Its easy to build and works great. Watch the video to see our first take on a soaker hose system. If you want to build a simpler version see my video for PVC connected soaker hose system.

The drip irrigation system I built uses copper pipe, which can be expensive, you can also use PVC pipe to build the manifolds that feed the soaker hoses.

I dug a slot into the ground and pushed the garden hose into it to hide the hose feeding each raised bed. This makes lawnmower much easier too, no chance of running over a garden hose that way.

Key to watering your garden with drip irrigation is to not water it too much, i know its fun to watch the water ooze out of the soaker hoses, but you want the beds to dry out a bit between waterings. I water my vegetable beds every 4-5 days. Tomatoes, especially, grow best when the soil dries out between waterings. Too much water is just as bad as not enough water, it makes it easy for fungus and disease to grow.

How long do soaker hoses last? I’ve had these in the ground year round for about 10 years. Some hoses have leaked, but not a lot. And its obvious when they are leaking, and easy to fix. All you do is cut out the leak, and connect the two pieces back together with a piece of pipe.

If the water pressure going into the hoses is fairly low, or if you use an inline pressure reducer attached to the garden hose, you can use cable ties instead of clamps to put the lines together.

Water timers for garden hoses have improved a bit lately, below is one i recommend. Some of these timers are awful to try to program.

September 27, 2009
How to build a raised bed for vegetables or flowers GF TV Video

Build a simple raised bed with this DIY video. With this raised bed plan we show you how to make raised vegetable or flower beds without using pressure treated lumber The current raised beds in the garden have been there about 8 years now. So we must have done something right. how unusual… If you want to build raised beds, the ones we have are good for vegetables and flowers, check it out, let us know your thoughts.

Our raised beds are 4 feet wide and 12 feet long, make sure the raised beds are 4 feet ( 48″ ) wide on the outside dimension. This will make it easy to use floating row fabrics or plastic sheeting that comes in 48″ wide rolls. I learned this the hard way.

DIY raised bed plan complete

You may want to consider putting 1/2″ galvanized wire screening across the bottom of the raised bed frame before siting it and loading in all the dirt, this will keep out moles and voles. We haven’t had a huge problem with that, but I see how it could for some people.

For our garden soil, we had a delivery from a local nursery that sells a garden soil mix. It can be hard to find a company nearby that sells what you want, you may end up mixing it all up yourself. Let me know how you have built your raised beds below:

September 16, 2009
How to start seeds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Learn here how to start seeds in pots or trays with the experts. In the city we live near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and they showed us some great seed starting tips. By starting your own seeds, you can get a lot more plants for less money, and you get to grow plants that are not available at your local nursery. neat.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden uses bark as a seed starting medium. I can’t seem to find that stuff, so i use coir, which is compressed coconut fiber, and mix in vermiculite or perlite to add some air to the mix.

One of the keys i think, is to not have the seeds too wet, over-watering your seed starting trays can cause a bunch of problems and kill the seedlings. Its also important to have the seed trays in direct sun, I use a grow light, you can watch our how to build a grow light video here. Having the seeds in a window will cause the seedlings to get leggy – spindly.

Other GardenFork DIY seed starting videos you may enjoy:

How to Start Seeds and Make Seed Starting Pots

How to Start Seeds the GardenFork Way

How to Build a Grow Light

Here is a book on seed starting basics you might like to check out:

Buy From An Independent Bookstore
Buy From Amazon

September 15, 2009