Greetings from NE OH

[miboss]

Thank you admins for approving my membership.

I'm in Northeast OH, I've been wanting to get into making syrup as a hobby, and am finally moving forward. I have about 8 acres of woods and have already gone through about 66% of my trees. I'm already at 200 potential taps, and I could end up with ~250 taps. After identifying, it looks like I have all sugar maple and some very large, old trees with no signs they have ever been tapped. Some trees are 30+ inches in diameter!

As you could imagine, I have lots of questions, which I will try to detail in another post. My fist concern is just how big do I want to go? I currently have no equipment and will need to buy, well...everything.

My other hobbies are chickens (I keep about 36), bees (4 hives) and a fruit orchard (mainly apple and peach, and some plum).

I do have a couple ATVs and a Kubota L3800, which should help with some of the manual labor.

I'll probably evaporate outdoors my first year, as I have a large building planned (garage, wood shop, walk in freezer, bee/honey room) in the next couple years and I could add a sugar shack into the plans if needed.

Thanks for listening to a newbie, I look forward to a lot of learning in my future here.

Mike

[TheMapleNews]

Hi Mike,

Welcome to MapleTrader. There is a ton of great information on here to help you get started. It will likely become much more than just a hobby...

Good luck and have fun.

--Peter

[maple flats]

Welcome aboard Mike. We can give you ideas but the decisions must be yours.
I suggest you start with used everything, except the taps. Tell us a little about the lay of your 8 acres, are they flat, sloped, up and down or what? Once we have a idea of what you are working with suggestions will begin to flow. My first suggestion might be to find a local producer and volunteer some time helping him in exchange for some hands on experience. Read all you can, especially on this site. Another good resource is the North American Maple Syrup Producer's Manual, it has loads of info. If you find a used one, get that to start. Another good place to get ideas and find equipment is our sponsor, The Maple News. For that see the post above this one.
If buying a used evaporator, just be careful not to get a soldered one that had lead solder, welded is better, but not necessary for you to start. My first season I boiled on a 2x3 flat pan under a tarp. Not real easy, but it fueled my addiction, that summer I started building my sugarhouse.

[miboss]

My property is generally flat, up by my house there is about a 10 ft increase in elevation, but the bulk of the trees to be tapped are all level.

I do plan on finding a local producer. I missed out on the boiling season last year by a couple weeks, so I could not really observe anything.

I guess my biggest concern is how big of storage tank to get. Most likely, I'll only be able to boil on weekends, so if there is a heavy run, I'm thinking I may need 1000+ gallon storage, which may be beyond a beginners ability to handle, but I'm always up for getting over my head or taking a day off.

As for equipment, I was going to go with bags. Are bags generally reusable?

As for evaporator, I was leaning toward smokey lake, but not sold on anything yet.

I don't think I'm ready for a vacuum tube system. On a side note, do people with a network of tubes setup ever have deer rip through them? We have no shortage of deer on my property :)

I was considering a refractometer, since misco has the ability to custom make on that can handle maple and honey measurements, but I'm not sure if I should also get a hydrometer as well.

As for bottlers/canners, I'm not sure these also filter as well, or if they are even needed.

Automatic take offs, same, not sure if needed.

As you can see, I'm really on the fence with most things.


Welcome aboard Mike. We can give you ideas but the decisions must be yours.
I suggest you start with used everything, except the taps. Tell us a little about the lay of your 8 acres, are they flat, sloped, up and down or what? Once we have a idea of what you are working with suggestions will begin to flow. My first suggestion might be to find a local producer and volunteer some time helping him in exchange for some hands on experience. Read all you can, especially on this site. Another good resource is the North American Maple Syrup Producer's Manual, it has loads of info. If you find a used one, get that to start. Another good place to get ideas and find equipment is our sponsor, The Maple News. For that see the post above this one.
If buying a used evaporator, just be careful not to get a soldered one that had lead solder, welded is better, but not necessary for you to start. My first season I boiled on a 2x3 flat pan under a tarp. Not real easy, but it fueled my addiction, that summer I started building my sugarhouse.

[maple flats]

Line by line. For flat land without vacuum, bags are a good choice. Storage tanks, you should plan a minimum of 1 gal/day sap storage up to 2 gal/day over 5 days. As an emergency, if you can't boil, arrange to sell sap to another producer, some will buy it outright, most will boil it and give you a % back in syrup. Smokey Lake makes great equipment, but I still think you should start with used until you get accustomed to what you will be doing 2-5 years down the road. That may end up helping you select the right size evaporator for your first new one and shorten the string of evaporators as you might grow. I have all tubing with vacuum, in 13 seasons on tubing I think I only had 1 case where deer ran into it. They will usually jump over or go under. Other animals are not so good at that, moose, bear and domestics like cows do not respect tubing (a bull in a china shop comes to mind). I can't answer the refractometer question, I only use hydrometers, but I have 3 for sap and 4 for syrup. I do own a non digital refractometer but never use it (yet). Bottlers come with filter racks to filter the syrup. The racks set in the top portion of the unit, they hold a syrup filter and a set (3-4-5 pre-filters) and as the syrup flows thru the filter it runs into the canner. With those, as the top pre-filter gets loaded with niter, you gently lift and let the remaining syrup run onto the next pre-filter while retaining as much of the niter as possible in the one being removed. When I used that type, I had a hook or 2 up over the canner and I clipped the removed pre-filter up using a heavy spring clamp by holding the corners to get it to finish draining any remaining syrup still in that pre-filter. That process repeats as each pre-filter gets loaded with niter, but usually you do not go thru all of the pre-filters. Both pre-filters and syrup filters get cleaned and re-used many times in a season. As long as you never wring a filter to get the rest of the syrup out, it will last many seasons, but it is rather slow. In time, you will likely want a filter press, but that can wait. Automatic draw offs, I drew manually my first 14 seasons and it worked well. Then I got an auto draw and found it removed lots of stress, it never went too far, the auto draw opened and closed when it should so I could concentrate on other tasks.
Just get off the fence and jump in, unless you are seeing this as an unstoppable addiction and get out before you start. It's fun!

[miboss]

Thanks again for the info Dave. I understand your point about buying used, I've had mixed experiences buying used equipment, which is why I was considering new, but given the investment, it's hard not to consider used in this case.

[karl evans]

Keep in mind the big maple equipment auction Ray Gingerich has every year. This year is Sept. 16th. That's near Orwell Ohio.

[maple flats]

Thanks again for the info Dave. I understand your point about buying used, I've had mixed experiences buying used equipment, which is why I was considering new, but given the investment, it's hard not to consider used in this case.
In buying used just look carefully and objective. Don't skip over a complete look over and notice the little things.
Then sometimes you just need to take a chance. An example, Back in 1984 I went to a farm equipment auction and spotted a 3 point hitch rototiller that was built very heavy for it's size. It looked like it had not been used in a few years. I tried to turn the PTO drive shaft but it wouldn't budge. I then bought it at the auction for $225. Yes, I could have bought scrap iron, but when I got it home, I just leaned it back a little and put some good penetrating oil on the outer portion of the input bearing and let it set a few days. I then hooked it to my little 20 HP tractor, lifted the arms, turned on the power take off and let out the clutch and it spun to life. I used that Rototiller for 33 years until mid season this year when some gears in the drive finally gave out. I checked to get new gears and they had been discontinued in the 1970's. I did a recycle yard search but found none. That $225 tiller is finally scrap, but in the years I used it, I tilled lots of ground, for 12 of those years by doing gardens for hire, in addition to tilling our gardens, and about 3 acres of commercial strawberries for 10 years while my 4.5 acre blueberry planting reached maturity.
No, that's not maple related, but it shows that auction or any other source of used can be a good investment.
My evaporators over the years have all been used, in fact my current one is a 3x8 used one that I had and ran for 5 seasons when I bought a new set of welded pans, and then a year later I added high pressure air over fire and air under fire (AOF,AUF), to enhance the boil.