Justamere Tree Farm Blog

Preserving food with maple syrup and maple sugar

With reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (highly recommend) just reaffirms what we believe in. We are busy putting up food in our freezer. I bought a big box of peaches at the Amherst Farmers Market yesterday and will slice them, add Justameres maple syrup and in the freezer they will go for this winter. Also I have been busy picking blueberries at a neighbors and have been cooking them down with Justameres maple sugar added. It turns into a wonderful blueberry sauce which will be good on most everything this cold winter.

I will add my carrot cake recipe and maple cream frosting in my next entry. Carrots are plentiful this time of year!

P.S. Be sure to check out Justamere Tree Farms new look on our web site. We have been busy for several weeks working on this. Enjoy!

Shearing and wildlife at Justamere Tree Farm

We have a few week-ends without craft shows, and we are trying to get caught up on the farm. I will continue to go to the farmers market in Amherst, MA every Saturday.

Here is a picture of J.P. next to a Fraser Fir tree that he is just beginning to shear. We are busy shearing our 14,000 x-mas trees. We do it all by hand using a shearing knife and clippers. All our trees get sheared once a year. This tree in the photo will be ready to sell this coming x-mas season. We are having a excellent growing season with plenty of rainfall.

Last week we saw lots of wildlife on our farm. In our pond for several days two otters were playing and making themselves at home in our pond. They were very cute to watch.

J.P. was hiking through our property and heard raucous nearby. It was a big shiny coated black bear digging around a stump.

Then one evening we saw off our porch a deer and its fawn grazing in our x-mas trees.

We love seeing wildlife on our land. They seem to enjoy the woods, cleared land, pond and stream. It’s a great place for them and us to live!

Maple Nuts

This is the Maple Nut recipe alot of you have asked for.

1. 8 lbs. walnuts, cashews, pecans or peanuts
2. 1/2 gallon Justamere tree farms pure maple syrup

Boil the syrup to 258 degrees and then pour over nuts and stir immediately till crystallized.( 5-10 minutes)