Karabin Farms (or Fall Comes to the Arctic)

I love fall up here in the Artic. This year, though, fall has kinda been lost on me; I've been holed up in the kitchen so that I haven't noticed the beautiful changing colors of the New England leaves or the cool crispness of the evenings. Today's outing, however, opened my eyes.

It was a gorgeous day, a perfect day for going on a pumpkin hunt. I found this treasure of a farm by doing a simple online search for pumpkin patches in the area. It's not much of a secret, though, because we definitely didn't have the place to ourselves. Still a great time, though!

We spent a little time selecting just the right pumpkins.

Some pumpkins didn't quite make the cut:

We went on a hayride, and while we were waiting in line, we were entertained by a man on his fiddle and a woman on a triangle.

And I thought all the rednecks were down south. Just kidding; the entertainment added a lot to the ambience.

Yep, it was a great day. 

I'm happy it's fall again...even if that means winter isn't so far behind. 

Sweet!

Due to the prohibitively high cost of maple syrup, I have kept my children on a strict Mrs. Buttersworth syrup diet since their first bite of pancake. Since then, of course, I have discovered that sometimes cheapest isn't always best. Not that any type of syrup is healthy, but when choosing the lesser of the two evils, maple syrup certainly beats high fructose syrup on pancakes and waffles.

Unfortunately, once conditioned always conditioned...the last time I purchased the liquid gold, the children declared they did not like the taste at all. So imagine my surprise when they all but drank some maple syrup during our last field trip to see the process.

We began our tour in the barn so we could have a chance to visit with the animals.












After the barn, we kind of headed in a backwards fashion through the tour. Since there were three other groups doing the tour with other leaders, our next station was the pancake station to sample maple syrup. And that is where the kids decided they do indeed enjoy real maple syrup. Unfortunately, this was not syrup from the farm as this is a 4H teaching farm and therefore does not produce enough syrup to sell. They loved it nonetheless and may have even licked their plates.




After sampling the syrup, we learned about how to identify a maple tree in the dead of winter and then how to tap it. We followed our indoor instruction with an outdoor trek to check out the sap that was draining into the buckets of some tapped maple trees.

Following that, we went to the sugar house to see how the sap is boiled in the evaporator until it becomes thicker and develops that beautiful amber color. We learned that it takes 40 gallons of sap just to make 1 gallon of syrup! No wonder it's so expensive!


I probably don't have to tell you that I stopped by a farm on my way home to purchase some real maple syrup!