Drilled and Tapped

I’ve got to stray from Cooking Wild in Missouri just a little a bit to brag about a couple of the many things that Ann got me for my birthday. They both involve edibles that we gather from the outdoors, so I’m not getting too far off of our theme.

The first were mushroom spores – several hundred of them. Not only did she get me the spores, but she also had cut me a dozen small white oak logs that I could inoculate with the spores. The spores came in a big plastic sheet, and looked like thimbles with little white Styrofoam caps on top. We drilled the logs with a 7/16 bit, making wholes in a diamond pattern, and then poked in the spores in with their cone-shaped inert matter and Styrofoam hats. We’ll water the logs, maintaining at least a 30 percent moisture content, and then come fall we’ll harvest some shiitakes.
We didn’t have to wait as long to reap the fruits of another one of my gifts: spiles and buckets for maple syrup making. Again, we drilled with the 7/16 bit, only this time it was in standing trees in our yard. Then we pounded in the spiles, hung the buckets, installed the lids, and a couple days later Ann was cooking down the syrup.

We tapped one Sugar Maple in our yard, but the other one has already budded out, which makes it no good for tapping this spring. So we also tapped some of our walnut trees. Apparently their sugar content isn’t as high as the maples, but when you cook it down the syrup is just as good.

Both the maple and one of the four walnuts flowed very well, the other walnuts not so much. This should be a good time, as it is supposed to be below freezing at night and above during the day. But since one of our maples is budded out already, I guess we may be a bit late.

But Ann and I both sampled the walnut/maple syrup that she cooked down, and it tastes great. Pancakes here we come. Happy birthday to me.