Planning for guests

[billyinvt]

Every year I have family and friends who assume there will be active sugaring on Saturdays in March. They make plans to come up months in advance and sure enough, the weather and sap do not cooperate. I try and tell them that I can't make any promises, but they come anyway. A guy can only take the Ben and Jerry's tour so many times!

[Bucket Head]

Yeah, it never fails. I had friends stop by this weekend and I tapped a tree and hung a bucket to show how it's done. Freezing cold- not a thing came out of the tree- even put it in the sun. As you can imagine, the visitors were not too impressed with that demonstration.

For more activities for visitors, I'm thinking we need to have "active firewood production" operations ready to go if it's cold and have "complimentary" leather work gloves to hand out!

[Big_Eddy]

Take a gallon of last year's syrup, add 40 gallons of water to it - pour it in the evaporator and boil away :)

[Galena]

Yep, never fails...a few years back my eldest bro came to visit. Sure enough the trees stopped running the day he arrived and began running again the day after he left :-)

[Trapper2]

Yeah, it never fails. I had friends stop by this weekend and I tapped a tree and hung a bucket to show how it's done. Freezing cold- not a thing came out of the tree- even put it in the sun. As you can imagine, the visitors were not too impressed with that demonstration.

For more activities for visitors, I'm thinking we need to have "active firewood production" operations ready to go if it's cold and have "complimentary" leather work gloves to hand out!

I had 9 guests this past weekend. Even though I had 180 gallons to boil, I didn't miss the opportunity to hand out work gloves. 3-4 full cords later and 1/2 done I'm not expecting many guests this weekend.

[FanshaweGirl]

A local operation here advertises that if there's steam coming out of the top of the sugar shack, they are open for visitors. If not, just visit the store and buy some syrup. No guarantees about what days or hours they will be open.

Not as easy to do with friends and family though.