Here’s our problem: We spend all of March making maple syrup, and then have so much we don’t know what to do with it. We give away as much as we can, but still we fill an entire shelf with little bottles of our many syrup batches. I know, I
Category: How-To
Tapping Birch Trees for Birch Syrup
If you’re wondering how to tap birch trees to evaporate the sap into birch syrup, it’s probably best to ask the Alaskans. (Free podcast idea: “Ask the Alaskans.”) They don’t have many maples, but they’ve got plenty of birch trees, and the birch syrup industry is booming. If you’re looking
Free PDF Yurt Guide
We’re so happy to have finally finished the first version of our PDF Yurt Guide. We wanted to make this guide as the sort of resource we wish we had when we were first investigating yurts. It can serve as an introduction to yurt living options and also as a
Backyard Sugaring: Collect Maple Sap with Five-Gallon Buckets
A small-scale maple sugaring operation like ours—basically, backyard maple sugaring—doesn’t use vacuum pressure to collect maple sap. Good old-fashioned gravity is our method of choice. There’s two methods to consider when deciding how you want to collect sap from your maple trees. First, there’s the picture postcard method: tap a
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What to Consider When Designing a Yurt Interior (or Tiny Home)
After hours and hours of building the yurt platform, and slightly fewer hours setting up the yurt itself, we had a big, round, empty space to make our own. I think this fact is often understated and underrated when considering what yurt life might be like—when you move into a
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How To Make a Cheap Maple Syrup Evaporator for Under $50
We made this basic and cheap maple syrup evaporator for less than $50, and it took less than an afternoon to put together. So you can file it under “cheap” and “easy” — but you can also file it under “effective.” We used it to boil down a season’s worth
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Making Maple Syrup: A Reasonable Reading List
Our approach to learning new things — like, say, making maple syrup — could fairly be called a “Learning-Based Approach,” and could perhaps more honestly be described as “slightly willy-nilly.” It goes generally like this: Get interested in new hobby or skill Read just a little bit online Buy the
Rustic Standing Desk Design — Under $100 and Easy to Build
I’ve now built two rustic standing desks for a couple of Annie’s colleagues. There are supposedly health benefits to a standing desk and there are plenty of “hacks” to give yourself a standing desk equivalent. But shouldn’t it look good, too? This simple rustic standing desk design is easy and
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How to Build Solid, Simple Sawhorses in Under an Hour
A good set of sawhorses is indispensible. Somehow, though, we made it through summer working on sawhorses that are old, rickety, and too short. Now that we’ve built these cheap, rock solid, and simple sawhorses, we’re wondering why we insisted on suffering for so long. This post is short because
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How to Clean an Aquacera Ceramic Water Filter
The Aquacera Traveler XL water filter is ridiculously easy to clean and maintain, and the ceramic filters themselves are easy to replace when it comes time. For starters, the filter is sturdy and solid but easy to deconstruct. The lid sits atop the top (unfiltered) reservoir and this top reservoir