Wheeler and Michael have started a YouTube channel!
@WheelerandMichael IN THE MAKING
This is something that we have been working towards for a while, and we have decided that sugar season is the perfect moment to launch this new endeavor. Our goal is to document the seasons of a handmade life in our workshops and on our farm. We hope to share a look inside our processes as makers- in the wood shop and leather shop, on the farm, in the woods, in the garden, and wherever the project of the moment leads us. We will be making films that quietly follow the slow work of shaping materials, tending the land, and cultivating beauty in the everyday. Check out our first video!
In the early years, making syrup was a very slow and rather peaceful process for us. We used to invite friends and family to come join us in the sugarhouse, and we would enjoy each other’s company and conversation over the soft, atmospheric sounds of the fire crackling and the sap bubbling and boiling in the evaporator as we all waited with great anticipation for syrup to come off the finish pan about once an hour. This was, however, when we only had a few hundred taps, and before we had vacuum pressure on our lines. As we have expanded our operation, we have, out of necessity, added equipment in our sugarhouse to be able to keep up with the increased volume of sap. In doing so, the entire operation has become much more industrial. The boiling is now loud enough that we spend most of the day wearing hearing protection. We now explicitly ask visitors not to come while we are making syrup because the entire process requires our complete attention. We stoke the fire every five minutes, and syrup comes out of the finish pan at a slow, but near constant pace. We are on our feet, moving from on end of the room to the next, for the entire day as we stoke, clean, filter, bottle, label, etc, all while keeping the evaporator hot enough that it feels like it might just somehow take off on its own like a steam-powered locomotive. After a long day of this, when we have processed nearly 1,000 gallons of sap in an 8 hour window of time, we are all very ready to sit down for a while and enjoy a quiet, still respite.
While most of our days boiling are now rather loud and busy, the first day of the season is still a little more like those earlier days. We call this process “sweetening the pan” because we are filling the evaporator with sap for the first time that season. The system holds about 50 gallons of liquid at any moment during use, and that volume becomes increasingly concentrated as steam comes off and new sap comes in. Even after a full day of boiling the sap in the pan is still too dilute to make finished syrup. For that reason, this is perhaps the most quiet day of the season in the sugar house as we open up our systems, and reacquaint ourselves with the many tasks of the sugar house. Once the pan is “sweet” the real work begins on the following days of boiling.
In this short film, we bring you into Waterfall Farm, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. We walk to work through the snow and up the mountain. At the sugar house we open up our systems, let down the season’s first run of sap, and light a fire for our first boil.
We invite you to subscribe to our youtube channel to see more of what we do here on Waterfall Farm.
All systems go for the syrup sale next weekend, Saturday, March 21st at noon!
We hope to see you there.