Making Crabapple Liqueur

We have three crabapple trees on our property that seem to produce a bumper crop every fall. 

When I was a kid I remember picking them and helping my mom make crabapple jelly, but it is one of those fruits that you don't always have that much use for.

This year I decided to make use of the excess crabapple harvest and make a home liqueur from them.

The crabapples on the tree looked amazing - this variety was a smaller variety than I remember as a kid, but they seemed to have the right slightly bitter crabapple flavor...

It didn't take very long to pick enough to get started.

I headed back in the house, de-stemmed and washed, then chopped each crabapple in half.   I didn't worry about coring them, as I had read that the core and seeds add to the mixture. 

I then placed the halved crabapples in a quart jar until it was nearly full.

 I then added two cups of sugar and then filled it to the top with vodka (roughly 3 cups). 

I stored the jar on its side, turning once every day for three weeks to help the sugar to dissolve. 

After three weeks, I filtered out the fruit and bottled the finished liqueur.

The result is quite amazing - the quintessential bitterness of the crabapple pairs perfectly with the vodka and sugar to make a great after-dinner liqueur.

- John Briner  

How to Make Your Own Echinacea Tincture

Every year around cold and flu season we run out and buy a bottle of Echinacea tincture as a preventative from getting sick.  The weird thing was we were spending upwards of $20 on a small bottle. 

So this year we grew our own Echinacea.  Echinacea is a beautiful flower that is also known as Purple Coneflower.

 ECHINACEA

I read up on making a tincture and learned that you can make tincture from the roots, stems, leaves, and flowers, so I decided to use all four!

I filled up a small canning jar about halfway with the roots, stems, leaves and flower of our Echinacea.  I then topped the jar up with vodka, and let it sit for 3 weeks. 

It looked pretty amazing when I first mixed it all together. 

Within a couple weeks it started turning the darker color you associate with the tincture you buy from your local health food store. 

We have been using the Echinacea tincture all winter long now, and haven't had to run out to buy the over-priced tincture we were accustomed to buying.

Now to get through the rest of the flu season without getting sick...

- John Briner

West Coast Maple Syrup?

Who knew you could tap maple trees on the west coast and make your own maple syrup? 

This is a project we have wanted to try for a while.  Last year we ordered supplies from Atkinson Maple Syrup Supplies in Ontario.  We ordered their Beginner Kit which consists of ten plastic spiles, ten buckets, and a whole lot of other things to get you started - enough to get a taste for tapping trees, or as they call it back east, "Backyard Sugarin'". 

Next we looked for suitable trees.  Here on the West Coast you can tap big leaf maple trees (which are fairly common), red maples, sugar maples (if you are lucky enough to find them big enough), as well as birch trees. 

Big Leaf Maple

 Luckily, there were a good number of Big Leaf maples in the forest at the back of our property.  There were a few good birch trees back there as well. 

We waited for the temperature to drop and started tapping!

The amazing thing about the West Coast is that you can basically tap all winter long.  Anytime it freezes overnight and then warms up by about ten degrees or so during the day, the sap will usually start running.  In our case, it started running as soon as we drilled into the tree.

Within minutes the sap started flowing pretty good.

When we had collected about 25 litres or so we took it in the house and started boiling it down.  The ratio we found was about 40 to 1.  We ended up with just over half a litre of maple syrup after about 3 hours worth of boiling.

Here is a collage of pictures of the entire process right through to the finished product.

West Coast Maple Syrup - probably the best tasting maple syrup I have ever tasted!

- John Briner

Our Backyard Homestead

What a great year 2014 was! 

This was our first full year on our little farm learning how to grow and harvest our own vegetables and fruit, as well as producing our own eggs, pork, chicken, beef and lamb.  Along the way, we started beekeeping and making our own apple and pear ciders and liqueurs.  We ended the year by learning how to tap west coast maple trees to produce maple syrup and birch syrup. 

We even experimented with making our own natural oils and vinegars.  We are excited to share what we have learned this past year as well as share real-time as we try out new ideas and projects that can be done in any backyard or hobby farm.  

Here's a quick shot of our raised beds and prepping the garden earlier this year.

- John Briner