Pure maple syrup, cooking, raising little sapsuckers (aka children), and the natural life is the life of this Mama.

If you would have asked me 10 years ago what I wanted my future to look like, it would have been….get married to a man who loves me for who I am, have wonderful beautiful children and raise them to love God, stay home and be the best wife and Mom I can be.

Talk about dreams coming true, this one did!! And God blessed me beyond my deepest desires. Life couldn’t get much sweeter…but wait…it did with pure maple syrup.

In 2011 I was married 1 1/2 years and had a 10 month old baby boy. It was my husband’s dream to open a diesel repair shop. He was working almost 24/7 for local farmers running a tractor and helping his Dad build our shouse.

We thought we wanted to live in the shop.

I helped out as much as I could as well. It was tough at times, learning how to take care of my first baby, living away from everything I’d grown up with, and learning how to be the best wife my husband needed.

I wanted to raise healthy children and I already knew to do that we needed to eat healthy, God made food. I wanted to do it all, but it would take years to learn it. As I meet and made friends with other local women I learned many things- where to shop, how to be good wife, how to care for my children naturally, how to store up food for winter, and so much more.

One day as I visited a local country store I found pure maple syrup. Wow! I thought, I haven’t tasted that since I had lived at home with my parents. Alas! The thought of spending sixty dollars for a gallon seemed like a lot of money at this time in my life.

When I shared with my husband about the syrup he came up with the idea we needed to figure out how it was done and make our own.

He had a friend growing up whose Dad made pure maple syrup. And one day, I found myself watching and learning how this man made pure maple syrup. Before we left his farm that day, he had us set up to tap and collect the sap from the four maple trees in front of the old farm house.

Our maple syrup adventure begins. It’s sad to say that we didn’t get any pictures that year of making the syrup. My hubby ha some set up with the four-wheeler and a wagon with 5 gallon buckets. I bundle me up and my baby and go around to each tree collecting the sap.

We were making the syrup in a turkey cooler and finishing it on a hot plate in the skeleton of my soon to be house.

It was difficult at times to make it all happen. If you’d don’t know pure maple syrup takes a long time to make. Did I mention it takes a long time to make? I needed 40 gallons of sap to even make 1 gallon of maple syrup. People that is 8 – EIGHT five gallon buckets full. That little turkey cooker didn’t even hold 5 gallons and I was there a long time cooking it down.

We made 5 gallons a pure maple syrup that spring and we only melted one pan. Lol!

I don’t think the start of the maple adventure can get any sweeter or stickier than it already is.

So WELCOME to The Maple Mama Blog.