Hop Kiln Road 2023

[Hop Kiln Road]

A little earlier than I want but then I tapped 2/15/12 and that season was over 3/14/12. Got a third in yesterday and should be finished by Sunday PM. Trees were all running but not hard.

[MapleLady]

Something to think about.... Long range temps are looking favorable, we are definitely thinking about putting out taps for our little backyard operation this weekend.

[eustis22]

Where do you see that? I see winter being OVER next weekend with temps in the 60s

[Hop Kiln Road]

First two field tanks were to the brim last night, in about 24 hours. Meanwhile got the steepest bush tapped. Going to load the membranes this morning, then pump the tanks before they spill. Evaporator needs some assembly and still 200 left to tap. Forecast here is perfect for heavy flow all week. I get a llliiittle nervous until the entire system is up and running! No time to send up a weather balloon but it sure smellls like a repeat of 2012.

[MapleLady]

Time will tell. It looks like a good week ahead - a bit too warm Thurs/Fri, but nighttime temps look favorable for sap. The week after still looks good. I am still hoping for a few weeks of plentiful sap.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Plenty of nice sap, sugar only 2%, but blew a RO fuse Sunday morning so no steam yet.

[Hop Kiln Road]

First run... Well, probably only part of a run that I captured and the first run may have been back in January. And of course, everything that was running when I turned it off last spring didn't want to start when I tried to turn it back on. Blew a little time delayed fuse trying to start up on Saturday and couldn't get a replacement until Tuesday AM. But made 50 gal of 58% on the Hanna. Better quality than last season.

[Amber Gold]

That little fuse has gotten me before too.

When should we expect to see the annual maple season poem?

[Hop Kiln Road]

Crunched the 900 gal we pumped Friday into the SH and my son and his buddies came over and cooked it Saturday...after we got the valves and evaporator unthawed...about an hour process. Should have drained the float boxes but I didn't think it was going to be that cold! Made another 20 plus gal of 65%. The warmest bush is at 9 gpt and I'm already at 34% of average overall for sap. Getting a little frost back in the ground and the forecast is improving.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Forecast of a sunny afternoon yesterday didn't happen. So limited sap flow. And maybe a little sap today and Tuesday but then the weathermen say no sap for 7 to 10 days. Give me time to deal with a failing sap pump (a Honda with no aftermarket parts!) and defective tank sensor. Also got a remote battery that doesn't seem to be accepting the charge from the solar panel.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Ended up pumping 1.4 gpt last night and it was running hard. Got one sap pump awaiting parts and the backup is a little baulky, so it was slo-mo fun... Sap probably ran into the night and we'll get a little more today. Got 25 3rd graders visiting this morning, going to make sugar-on-snow, then tackle the backlog before the long hard freeze.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Temps didn't get out of the low 30's yesterday, so there might have been 200 gal and I left it in the tanks. Will pump everything tonight before the snow and then the long freeze, our forecast says 10 days, but I doubt it. Sugar-on-snow was a huge hit with the 3rd graders...after they decided it was in fact edible.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Sap has been coming in the late afternoon with low air pressure and temps in the low 30s. I use a dump tank at the end of my driveway with 300' of gravity 1.5" that feeds directly into the RO. No capacity to store raw sap in the SH. Before a cold snap, I need to have the trailer tank, the dump tank and the 1.5" line empty and valves open or restarting is an issue. Waited too long to start pumping the 1gpt last night and the temp dropped faster than I figured. Had to take the last 200 gal and dump it back in a field tank for the 7 day freeze. Better than fighting a 35F restart. So season is now at 50% of my average annual sap yield, cold snowy weather ahead, and it ain't even March.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Tore through the 600 gal in about 3 hours of evaporator time. SH didn't get above 34F and the floor was slightly icy. Made just a couple quarts shy of a keg, so he sap must be running close to 2%, but the field refractometer has been reading lower, probably needs to be recalibrated. Drained everything including the float boxes and the RO filters, opened all the valves and system drains. Probably have 400 gal in the field tanks, maybe have ice cubes until mid-March? Alas, brain fog, the weather in February had me convinced I'd be planting peas March 15th.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Going to be sitting around for a couple of days so I thought I'd work on the reading list:


A Sugarbush Like None Other

Adirondack Maple Syrup and
The Horse Shoe Forestry Company

By Matthew M. Thomas


The remarkable story of well-heeled Brooklyn, NY, businessman A. A. Low’s foray into the maple business at the end of 19th century. A successful businessman, and from a line of successful businessmen, Low was a multi, multi-millionaire in the 1890’s. As such, he understood such concepts as vertical integration and was keenly aware of the hotly debated conservation and forestry sustainability movements of his age. While many of his New York City peers, with new railroad access to the vast Adirondack wilderness, acquired large forest tracts for palatial estates focused on hunting and summer recreation, Low had other ideas, big ideas. And with his wealth and background, he was competent at executing big ideas.

The result was an enormous maple operation of 50,000 buckets in the late 1890’s. If one good man could collect 400 buckets a day, it would take 125 of these heartly souls to gather one day of Low’s sap run. They would lug the sap to nearby pipe systems which would carry it down slope to tanks along the railroad. That’s right, to collect the sap Low built miles of narrow gauge train track connecting his sugarbushes to his three maple factories. Assuming an average of a gallon a bucket a day and using the largest, state of the art, wood fired evaporator of the day, 50,000 gallons would require in excess of 250 hours of boil at 200 gallons per hour. Thus he equipped his factories with several dozen 5 by 15 foot Grimm evaporators. The logistics are staggering. At 25 gallons a cord, it would require 50 cords a day, 6,400 cubic feet, for an average day’s boil. They would boil 20 to 30 days a season. Like gathering the sap, the railroad greatly facilitated the movement of cordwood and, importantly, moved the finished product to his high-end market. Still, a phenomenal deployment of vision, manpower and capital. Using conventional ratios, 50,000 buckets would produce around 15,000 gallons of syrup per season. And Low had a rail line right to his established business base of New York City at a time sweeteners were still an expensive grocery item. His business went very well, for a while, until disaster struck.

As impressive as his operation was, electricity generation and experimental steam evaporators, it is perhaps more noteworthy how little evidence remains just over a century later. Agriculture has always been precarious in the northeast. All that is left are minor foundations and railroad grades. And surprisingly very little oral history as the setting was the wilds of the Adirondacks and the labor transitory. Families never established and their histories were never recorded. Fortunately, we have Thomas’ work and accounting, and it is a great look into a bygone era.

[Hop Kiln Road]

The Maple Sugar Book

Together With Remarks
On Pioneering
As a Way of Living
In the Twentieth Century

Helen & Scott Nearing



This is a classic, kids! For those travelers out of the loop, Scott Nearing was a banished and blacklisted, socialist professor at Swarthmore College in the late 1920’s when he married a very complicated, quasi elitist, much younger woman, Helen Knothe. Actually, he stole her from a famous British guru of the day, Jiddu Krishnamurti, but not to get off on a leaky lateral as both Helen and Scott’s pre maple lives were exceedingly complicated journeys. Being unable to find suitable employment in the cities, they bought a worn-out farm in the rural hills outside Jamaica, Vermont and began subsistence farming in the 1930’s. They detailed their experiences in the famous back to the earth best seller, “Living the Good Life.” A central tenant they tout in their vegan subsistence strategy was developing and focusing on a cash crop, which they decided would be maple sugar.

Scott was dynamic, outspoken, very industrious, and complicated too. After watching and working with his neighbors, some trial and error, and much thought, he engineered a large, branched pipe system, running far up the side of a mountain, that emptied right into the sugarhouse. Think the veins of a giant maple leaf! All the trees were tapped with buckets and emptied daily into the nearest branch of the pipe system, which was less than several hundred feet away from most trees. This system, once debugged, was far more efficient than the traditional method of using a gathering tank hauled through the sugarbush by horses or oxen.

Moreover, as he thinned his woods into compact areas of solid sugar maples, the efficiency of his pipe system increased. Thinning also provided fuel for his evaporators, fuel to heat his house, wood for his buildings and even poles for his extensive gardens. As we know now, larger trees with more leaves produce better sap and thinning produces larger trees.

To alleviate his extensive fear of fire - and insurance companies and banks and doctors and politicians - he self-insured against fire and equipment failures by building two identical stone sugarhouses. They included massive stone chimneys. Traditional metal evaporator stacks heights were typically 2 times the length of the evaporator to provide the necessary draft for the fire. His evaporators required 30 feet of stack height with an I.D. of 24 inches. They were notoriously difficult to erect, support and maintain. Dry, seasoned wood is essential for efficient operation of wood fired evaporators and he designed and built a large woodshed with a track system to feed wood to the evaporators. He could run one sugar house while the other evaporator was cleaned, another essential chore, or both units at once during peak flows.

He also quickly discovered value added products and found maple sugar candy much more profitable than selling syrup. But he also discovered the rapid development of Stratton Mountain ski resort, with its increasing flow of customers, was over running his pastoral idyll. Rampant capitalism was at his doorstep…so he and Helen packed up and move to the Maine coast to grow blueberries.

All sounds great, eh? Well, there is a catch. This ain’t a boot strap story. As Helen wrote later in life, they inherited a great deal of money…from the guru lover…during the Vermont adventure. Ah, I’m sure Scott would agree, capitalism is insidious. And wait, as a postscript, he and Helen sold the property to a flatland engineer, George Breen, who decided to replace Nearing’s still too labor-intensive bucket and metal pipe collection system with plastic tubing and quickly became 3M’s largest blood transfusion tubing customer before he threw in the towel!

[Hop Kiln Road]

The Sugar Season

A Year in the Life
Of Maple Syrup, and
One Family’s Quest for
The Sweetest Harvest

By Douglas Whynott


This book is a must read for any modern maple enthusiast or producer of ten to ten thousand taps. Although it is the story of Bascom Maple Farm and Bruce Bascom’s rise to a giant in the industry, its scope is far greater. It is also a chronicle of the 2012 maple season. Coincidently the 2012 season was much like 2023 season. 2012 was a record early start for most, then short and unseasonably warm. It was over by the 3rd week of March after a week in the 70s F, culminating in a record high in Concord, NH of 81 F on March 20th. The Canadians fared a little better with the weather, but the total crop was still well short of average. And the 2012 culminated with the infamous Great Syrup Heist.

Titan might be a better description than giant for Bruce Bascom. Throughout the book we are only given glimpses of the size and reach of the Bascom operation. Just the numbers bandied about in the book give pause. $250,000 trailers of barrels in, out, in and out. A warehouse in Quebec on one page then shipping 25 tons of sugar packets to Japan…a month… on another. More trailers of barrels in and out. The sales during his April 2012 open house weekend, $250,000. Then watch out, more trailers. The USDA says only 2 million gallons were produced in the poor 2012 season in the US. And Bascom had just completed a new refrigerated cooler to hold 750,000 gallons of barrels, which sparked his famous quip, “I got all of Maine in my basement.”

Bascom and his family lieutenants were quintessential innovators. Early to dump buckets for tubing. Early to recognize the power of thinning maple groves. Early to use reverse osmosis. Early to boil with steam. And perhaps his greatest achievement, back to the roots of the industry, conquering the high volume production of maple sugar. His sugar machines purportedly heat low grade or even damaged syrup under vacuum, resulting in a lower boiling point thus less caramelization, and still producing great maple sugar.

But it was sales manager Coombs that really allowed the petal to hit the metal. Sprinkled over the book, like fine magic sugar, is the Bascom creed of locking in the demand and then worrying about the supply and its inherent cost. Running with the big conglomerate dogs means chain store shelf space, international sales and bulk ingredient sales, all in vast volumes and inherent headaches. Unfathomable volumes if you’re chucking wood into a 2X6. Yet everything is just another drop in the bucket for Coombs’ ability. There is no question Bascom is an ace commodity trader, but it was not 100% pure maple syrup speculation, he had contracts to fulfill. And in a worse case, there was always tapping the famed Strategic Reserve on the other side of the border, being only a question of price and the interest costs of holding inventory, gut wrenching as it might be.

The added bonus to this book is Whynott’s chronicles of his travels in Mapleland. Dozens of memorable characters and antidotes from both sides of the border. From Bascom’s neighbor and forester, Peter Rhodes, selling thousands of gallons of sap while still raw boiling hundreds in his family’s rustic sugarhouse, to the producers and buyers on Maine’s remote Gold Road, whose only access is through Canada.

Of course, there is a downside to all stories. None of the children are interested in succession. Sugar House Road is remote; no natural gas line, no sewer line, high NH electrical costs, poor road infrastructure, limited labor pool, but it does have a great view, south and west, of Vermont. However, in perspective, that horizon is so close, almost claustrophobic, when the market balloons to worldwide. And this is a story of an ancient maple season now 10 years before high brix. Extrapolate and fast forward to today.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Maple King

The Making of
A Maple Syrup Empire

By Matthew M. Thomas

Maple historian Matthew Thomas’ great read of George C. Carey’s dominance of the maple market in the early 20th century. Carey, a struggling salesman in the fabled Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, finds his rainbow via persistence and luck, and accepting risk that others refuse to undertake. Originally selling groceries to village general stores between Portland, Maine and Burlington, Vermont, Carey closed a difficult sale by taking 1500 pounds of maple sugar in trade. Surely the grocer had taken the sugar in trade and grinned upon the handshake. Months later on a train ride, and having been unable to unload the sugar at a breakeven price, Carey bumps into a tobacco plug salesman and dickers a small trade to get the salesman to convince his Virginia company to at least try substituting maple sugar for cane sugar in its product, by under selling the price of cane sugar. This deal took place in the late 1800’s after the price of cane sugar had dropped below the price of maple sugar. And…it’s a loss leader. But it was an effective ingredient and super salesman Carey parleys his foothold into a big contracts to provide maple sugar for chewing tobacco flavoring. The old sell at a loss, but make it up on volume!

Carey establishes his base of operation in St Johnsbury, Vermont. The location is a wonderful marriage: where the access to Mapleland’s supply joined the train tracks of demand. He erects warehouses along the train route, builds and contracts sugarhouses incountry, and hires agents to buy maple syrup and sugar throughout northern New England and southern Canada. He builds a large factory to process maple syrup and sugar. He puts St J on the map.

There was nothing special about the maple sugar needed to flavor chewing tobacco. Grade C is works just fine. So Carey develops higher end markets for syrup and candies while shipping sugar from the lower grades to Virginia. It is easier to buy a producers’ entire production at a set price if you stand to profit by simply reselling the bottom grades. And like A.A. Low in the Adirondacks, the key was the railroad transportation network. He was well on his way to cornering the market and setting the price on the supply side. Again, a perfect, well executed plan for the maple industry, and it appears no tree will be left untapped…until disaster strikes.

Economy of scale is not a New England trait, especially in terms of agriculture. Critical mass is difficult to achieve. Typically, New England has always been about trying to make more out of less, inevitably leading to boom-and-bust cycles. Think timber, wool, waterpower, milk, and now even snow; all industries nurtured and then strangled by the very market forces that begat them and due to the ultimately limited natural resources. But George Cary was a visionary for the maple industry. He peered beyond where the train tracks disappear behind the next hill and saw markets and capital to retrieve and deploy. Maple remains a sustainable and renewable resource. But as the Maple King found, markets rule, and tend to be fickle.

[Hop Kiln Road]

26F this morning and the next three afternoons may reach 40F. Forecast is currently for traditional sap weather and more March snow. Well it's March 1st, a traditional start date and now we're looking at the 2nd half of the season. Got a couple more books to go but I need to pump the field tanks and knock back the ice buildup. Think I had a nice chat with a Pakastani chap from the IRS about whether they scanned my middle initial is E or C and whether they're going to reverse the penalties. Hard to be sure with his accent and my hearing. Also got the carb cleaned on one of the Hondas, so pumping should speed up. Should be boiling this afternoon.

[Pdiamond]

Bruce, be careful of scammers. I don't believe anyone would be calling you from the IRS speaking with a strong foreign language. By the way while on my travels today in Michigan I passed a very familiar road - Hop Kiln Road. it's located between Eaton Rapids and Jackson, Michigan. Drove by it on M-50.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Didn’t get warm enough to unfreeze lines above ground, except for a couple of strings of 24”+ trees which ran while the temp was above 32F. Tanks have solid blocks of ice. But my driveway is completely clear because there’s no frost in the ground. We’ve got a snowpack without tree wells and more snow coming. Foreseeable temps look warm enough that I can take the SH out of the hard freeze lock mode. P, yeah, I called them and he knew the notice #’s. But their scan read the wrong initial and Hop Kiln as Hop Hill and now they’re not sure who I am. And if there is a Hop Kiln Road in MI then the only thing unique is this world are snowflakes and maple operations.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Felicity Where Art Thou?

Tapped out in carharts and gaiters,
Sugary kids all fidgety as idle waiters
While deep snows pile higher and higher
Awaiting Nature’s cherished sweet flyer.

Woodsheds stowed full in neat ranks
Where even the wee wash their big tanks,
And buckets and buckets galore,
Hung with Saint Nickolas pray and more.

Tubing spidered in webs snug so tight
By old and young a snowshoe all night,
On dark hillsides’ whine with a sucker’s hiss,
Headlamps twinkle and search fittings amiss.

Long they shoe and frozen evenings they toil,
Before torching stick wood for a roaring boil.
Til old timers doze with rhythmic wheezings
To the hum of new-fangled electric squeezings.

Each steam dream hopes tis Felicity they snag,
Even lest risk one scorches a sisterly hag.
Woe, many nary draw a frosted glimpse hoary,
Let alone the sought sweet kiss of their quarry.

For south of the border she so quietly wings,
The brightest light orb she so quickly brings.
Blink, aye, cause only a moment she tarries,
As it must be with all sweet flighty fairies.

And tis due north she so nymphfully scurries
While foolish forecasters still call cold flurries.
So sulks many a brave and heartly stoker forlorn,
Felicity’s hasty flight toward her mother’s horn.

[Amber Gold]

And there it is...

[Hop Kiln Road]

Lines started to let loose around 11AM yesterday morning. Pumped 1 gpt last night. Got it into the SH before the temperature dropped. Ice was still frozen to the bottom of the tanks. Sugar was up, which is nice. 30F this morning so it could have run part of the night. Some of the lines were running pretty hard when we were pumping. Going to boil in the snowstorm later this morning. Forecast for the rest of the week should put me close to an average season.

[Hop Kiln Road]

26F this AM. 10" of heavy snow yesterday. Had a 4 hour boil with several stranded tourist stopping by. Grade went up to 67. Going to finish plowing out this morning. Forecast is a little cold so probably light afternoon runs this week. With the snowpack, it really looks like the beginning of the season but we're at 60% of average.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Another GTP last night. Been getting short, heavy afternoon runs. One bush has a transfer line across 300’ of brushy swamp to get to the road. Shurflo had ground down to a halt. The overflow barrel was overflowing. Went out to find the problem. It was right in the middle where a bear had decimated about 3’ of line about 4 years ago and I had spliced in a section. Between the SS clamps, the splice, the wire sag the bear created, and the 9 day cold snap, there was long frozen jam. While I was contemplating what to do, in one foot goes in. Not so much water, but muck, over the top of my boot, and I’m stuck, nothing to grab onto. Long struggle short, I finally have to take my foot out of the boot in order to pull the boot free with my hands.

[Pdiamond]

That sucks. Not only a wet and cold foot, but a wet mucky cold foot.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Perfect sugaring weather yesterday except the wind came up and reduced the flow to about .6 gpt. Also took down a big pine that made a mess near a pump box. Have to cut the lines and restring. Sugar in March has gone up. Still low sand, but new evaporator has a niter trap that works really well. Grade has been constant in the upper 60's. Forecast says no problem hitting average and might even do better than last year. Going to be too cold today for a flow.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Upper 20's and blowing snow much of yesterday so any sap added to the ice blocks. Got more jugs in the morning and then fixed the blowdown. It had pulled one tap free and I couldn't reinsert it because the drillhole was full of ice and more ice running down the tree. I've been pumping the tanks later in the afternoon, ro-ing in the evening and boiling the next morning, producing 12 to 20 gal a boil.

[white mt]

Haven't boiled in over two weeks, just cold enough to keep things from opening up .

[Hop Kiln Road]

Red Roof and I used to compare notes. He was 20 miles north and like 2 degrees different and used high vacuum. Many days one of us would run and the other wouldn't, but we always ended up pretty close. Now it's running well 1PM to 7:30PM so I'm not pumping until it reaches 30F in the morning, ro-ing, then boil after lunch. Very quickly closing in on an average season, couple more days. Warmest bush is at 18 gpt on 3/16 with no pump.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Getting perfect 26F/40F days and forecast says they'll continue. Still getting sap noon to 7:30 PM. These .6 gpt flows allow me a little time to bottle glass. All the tanks have ice. Nice 12" snowpack. No tree wells. Grade yesterday was 67.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Typical early season weather but just hit my 20 year average for sap. Sugar has been climbing since Feb 12. Hit 72 on the Hanna. Still no tree wells, ice in the tanks but with a little bacteria buildup starting, and heavy wet snow in the forecast. What an unusual season!

[Hop Kiln Road]

Pretty good conditions yesterday but very little sap as daily yield continues to drop. But the sugar remains higher than February and the grade is in the low 70's. Typically I'm in the low 60's. And I'm right at my 20 year average for gpt. No frost in the ground but a solid snowpack and another foot on the way. I think it is just a tad too cold, but we'll see, today is bright sun and 40F. Having a crowd for sugar-on-snow. Gotta find my Beach Boys cassette.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Ideal conditions yesterday but only .5gpt. Maybe the snowpack over the unfrozen ground is keeping the roots too warm? If so, about to add bigtime to the snowpack as we're 12"+ of heavy stuff Tuesday. OK traffic Sunday afternoon for the S-O-S in the bright sun. Like the newbies who have never seen an operation. Converted a couple of old timers away from the dark side with this year's light.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Several contradictory signs. On one hand perfect sugaring temperatures, high air pressure, good snowpack, no tree wells, ice in the tanks, mid-season date, sap dripping from the buds and high syrup grade, but on the other hand no frost in the ground, bacteria starting to show on the tank walls, sap a little milky and poor sap runs. I suspect the ground is too warm for the trees to recharge and that the season, despite all appearances, is over. Heavy wet snow today and I pumped .6 gpt last night, what little sap we produced from Sunday and Monday meager flows. Going to boil it this morning in the storm.

[Hop Kiln Road]

About 24" of dense snow, not wet. Field tanks are all buried. Unsure what line are buried too.A lot of limbs down but it's going to be pretty difficult to check the lines for a couple of days.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Got the driveway and a path to the SH opened with the tractor. Going to have to chain the tractor to finish the job. The new snow was really dense and didn't compact so pushed the drifts pretty high. Mid 30's in the afternoon and sap started to flow, slowly, maybe 1/2 gpt. Going to hit 40F today and tomorrow. Need to shovel access to the field tanks today and perhaps pump this afternoon. Be interesting to see what the rest of the season is like.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Got the road to the sugarhouse open, need to sand it before maple weekend. Dug out (down to) the field tanks. Jugged Tuesday's storm boil. Pretty surprised it was still in the 70's. The ground under the snow is warm but the air temp is marginal so sap flows are weak. Left everything in the field tanks and going to pump tonight to have something to boil over the weekend. Don't have any dark but this lighter stuff has been doing great in the tastings. But bought a qt of Big B's DR and see how that plays with the consumers.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Only pumped .6 gpt last night, backlog from a couple days. One tank was murky and two cloudy, the others pretty clear. But typical looking end of season stuff despite some ice in the tanks, snow tight against the trunks and 2 feet of snowpack. Maybe another week. Haven't made any dark yet.
Cleaned up the SH a little, polished some of the SS. These tastings are always a riot! I bought a qt of factory syrup at the local supermarket the other day and it is....astounding, to say the least. I urge other producers to try some.

[blissville maples]

Several contradictory signs. On one hand perfect sugaring temperatures, high air pressure, good snowpack, no tree wells, ice in the tanks, mid-season date, sap dripping from the buds and high syrup grade, but on the other hand no frost in the ground, bacteria starting to show on the tank walls, sap a little milky and poor sap runs. I suspect the ground is too warm for the trees to recharge and that the season, despite all appearances, is over. Heavy wet snow today and I pumped .6 gpt last night, what little sap we produced from Sunday and Monday meager flows. Going to boil it this morning in the storm.

I'm sure the ground is frozen under the snow, reducing sap runs. All the roots cannot suck water that's why runs are so-so. When all roots are thawed that's when the big runs start

[Hop Kiln Road]

Thought the first day of Maple Weekend was a hair slower than previous years. Sensing the consumers don't have as much to spend. The boil went okay and the cloudy sap dropped the grade to 64. Canner is acting up, the last ten gallons is turning cloudy but the temperature of the batch isn't going over 190. Probably needs a little agitation? And...I pour my S-O-S on a big SS pan on a table outside the SH. Works well if there is a herd of school kids. So I started pouring a bunch of strips between visitors when the syrup is ready and go back into the SH to do other things. Well, it disappears when my back is turned!!!

[Hop Kiln Road]

Cold and blustery Sunday. Fire pit and S-O-S were popular with the guests! Overall, more folks than last year but their spending was down. Now for the rest of the season? A couple warm days coming which will give us some tree wells and I guess we'll see if we get more sap...

[Hop Kiln Road]

Pumped 162 gal from 800 taps, which was 3 days of production. Sap ranged from clear to milky. Despite perfect conditions, the trees aren't recharging, which I attribute to the warm ground trapped under 2 feet of hard snow. Sunday night had a low of 23F and Monday a bright sun high of 42F. C'est fini. This is an above average year 110% only because I caught some of the early February run. 32% of my production was between 2/12 - 2/16. If I had been fully tapped by 2/7, it would have been closer to 150% of average. The other remarkable thing, lowest grade was 64%. Leaving the taps in for awhile until the snow goes down and the walking is easier, and, in case I'm wrong!

[Hop Kiln Road]

I live on a hilltop that looks mostly east while the maple trees slope away more toward the south. In the summer I enjoy sitting on the patio and watching the contrails as the first appear over the horizon. I can see two routes coming to and leaving the east coast, Europe from across the north Atlantic and Asia from over the top. With the aid of a flight tracking ap, I spot the jets somewhere between York Beach and Portsmouth and learn the details of their flights. While postings have diminished on the Tapping Update section of the Trader, after 16 seasons I still find it too a valuable look over the horizon, not only of the weather and a season's progression, but of knowledge and innovation. Thank you.

[cropseyvillemark]

Thank You Sir! And please keep it coming.

[red maples]

same here... If got tapped in a few days earlier I would have been closer about 150% as well ended up at about 110to 120%. still chugging along but not sure for much longer. vac pumps is still going but little sap to speak of 2.5 day total was only 225 gallons on a little shy of 600 taps. but I am just about out of snow here on the seacoast. a little left on the colder part of my woods but trees are just petering out and not recharging like you said. and sugar has really dropped as well.

[BigJon]

Hi Bruce, I’m in Boscawen, and trying to see if the season will hold out for a few more days, I’m hoping to get one more 300gal tank of sap to run before I drain my pans and boil the last of the sweet out. Tapped in on Feb 14th like I usually do, apparently I should have done it a week earlier, but that’s sugaring. Running unusually low on wood since I didn’t get enough processed this past fall, I won’t make that mistake again.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Got another 200 gal of drips by Sunday and raw boiled for some visitors to chase out the sweet. Sap was pretty cloudy but not murky and made a 28 but tasted dark. Going to use some old Grade B stickers! Going to start cutting the taps today in the bushes that don't have too much snow. Although it was a good year, can't believe how many ideal days there were without a sap flows. Still attribute it to the lack of frost. Had there been frozen ground the early February run wouldn't have been anywhere near as heavy.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Hard to believe we're pulling taps when it looks like this!23106

[red maples]

holding out 1 or 2 more days. still getting a little sap on my buckets. same thing down here. I have no snow but sap just aint coming. gonna call it probably saturday. get eh Evaporator boiled out and start pulling taps!!! I think you are right on the no frost in the ground in february but also no frost in the trees either. the trees really just didn't freeze this year either. except for that deep freeze we had for that 1 or 2 days I actually had 2 trees crack about 10 to 15 feet vertically never seen that before.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Brad, I found this disappointing scar was I was untapping the other day. It's a couple years old but only visible now because the bark is falling off the wound. No insect tracks. 13" dbh tree with rough bark, not smooth like a young sugar maple. Wound is south facing in an area that was thinned 5 years ago. I suspect it is sun scald, but I have never seen it before on such a large diameter tree.23118

[red maples]

yeah I would say sun scald too. thats too bad.