Tapped 02/05 near Evansville, IN

[kiteflyingeek]

My first tapping ever!! I have been reading this website for about three months now -- just devoured all the info. I reviewed all the trees at my disposal and figured out I COULD get 63 taps in. My family convinced me to start a little smaller -- GLAD they did!

I drilled my first hole last night around 21:30 CST (9:30) with temp around 42*F. Pulled the bit out and sap started to flow :D. Put the spile in which had 3 feet of tubing to a 4.5 gal bucket. Once it dropped the length of the tube, I heard drip-drip-drip-drip at a rate of "two drops a heartbeat" like I read the old-timers used to say. It was great!

Went back inside and washed a few more buckets, drilled more holes in the buckets, cut more tubing, stuck spiles into tubing and that into buckets. Finally around 0:00 on 02/06, I drilled 8 more holes and setup 5 more buckets. That took about 20 min.

I checked one of the single line buckets this morning (02/06) around 7:15 and found what was probably around 3/4 gallon. The temp dipped down to 26*F so the tubing froze up -- but I got a freeze so more sap will run :).

I arrived home at 15:30 and checked the buckets only to find one of the double line buckets was overflowing. So, in 15 hours, 2 holes produced over 2.25 gallons each! Unfortunately, I am not quite setup to store or boil yet so I'm kind of scrambling. But I'll make it work.

Thanks for all who have posted and given their tips, tricks, and experience to get another guys hooked on the hobby ;)

--andrew

[Indiana-Jones]

Andrew, good to see the power of the maple has made another conscript. You are starting down a slippery slope my friend, in more ways than one. Yes it starts small, maybe just a few trees and I'll only boil on weekends with friends. Then just a couple of more trees and then I will be able stop. You come across a nice storage tank, you got to have it. A few more taps. If I can take a couple of hours off from the day job to get home early and get the sap collected. You tell the wife,"I'm spending too much time boiling, I need a bigger evaporator so I can spend more time with you Honey." More taps, now you are tapping trees down the wrong side of the fence line.

Someday in the future.

It is 10:30 on a cold rainy night in late February, you are alone, standing knee deep in mud with a LED head lamp strapped to your forehead holding two 5 gallon buckets of sap. Then you have the thought.....have I gone totally insane??

Anyway, good to have you aboard the maple crazy train, If you have any questions ask away somebody here has the answer.
I"m happy to help out if I can.

[kiteflyingeek]

Oh, I already have a large storage tank -- just not sure I want to / need to use it for maple ;)

Thanks for the reply.

[lpakiz]

Oh, you will. You will.
Chris, very nice summation. You nailed it!

[kiteflyingeek]

So, I took these pictures Wednesday afternoon but I'm just now getting to uploading them ;)

6644

6645

The above pictures show 2 of the three trees that I have tapped. The containers are all frosting buckets that came with lids :) and are 4.5 gal in size. I used some of the rough estimates that I pulled off this site to guess that if the taps gave me 2 gal/day, I had to only do two taps per bucket. As you read above, it still overflowed one of the buckets. :(

So, far -- there's about 18 gal in fridge / freezer and tonight I'm starting the concrete evaporator build. I'm also helping my Brother-in-Law get a few taps in at his house and tomorrow, I'll tap some trees at my Mom's house. But, the temperature hasn't been below freezing since Tuesday night (02/05) so there's not much flowing now -- whew!! I'm out of storage so I have to get the evap built! I'm planning to use 5 full size steam pans and add two half pans I picked up on CraigsList; one for a preheater and one for a finisher. I'll post pictures of that too but in another thread as this is really supposed to be about my tapping efforts ;)

--andrew

[kiteflyingeek]

I just completed my first boil!!! I'll be posting many more details about the concrete block evap and my first ever boil in a more appropriate thread -- but I wanted to share the success of the 9 taps. I boiled 8 gallons down to just under 2 quarts in 2.5-3 hours. My mom and a family friend helped with the learning & work -- and we all had fun. Tastes like I need to remove another quart from my syrup which will not happen until sometime after sunrise.

Thanks for reading!

[kiteflyingeek]

Finished the almost syrup this morning on the stove! Now I have about 1.5 pints of my OWN syrup :D. I put 1 pint up in a re-used plastic syrup bottle. Looking forward to opening that sometime later this year :cool:. BTW, finishing syrup inside generates ridiculous quantities of steam; I cannot imagine trying the whole process inside! :o

[ahowes]

And now you're hooked. Good job!
I am home from 2 weeks on a business trip; I hope to boil Monday and maybe Tuesday if the forecast is right. It just didn't seem right letting all my taps drain to the ground while I was gone. Sounds like I missed some good runs.

[ahowes]

Almost all of the January tap holes were healed over, so we spent about 4 1/2 hours this afternoon moving to new trees. By 2pm, the sap was literally pouring out. I didn't expect it to run until tomorrow at the earliest. It will be good to be boiling again!