tapping north of marcell

[sweet acer]

Trying to beat the weather and not lose our snowshoe trails to the trees, we decided to tap yesterday pm and finished this am. All went well but it was still difficult on some steep sidehills. Was supriesed to have one tap dripping and a couple of moist ones. Put out 84 taps on 3/16 tubing. Plan is to use shurflo pumps on 6 runs. I built a new RO with 3 400 gpd filters which I'm anxious to try. Looks like next week it may our first draw. If any sap flows before that it will flush our hoses. We put new drops and spouts on last fall which made our task easier this spring.

[sweet acer]

All of our lines are filled with frozen sap now. On the warmer days they they all drip for about a hour or so. The forcast here looks like it will be 2 weeks +- before the run will happen. Sure glad we got out taps in as it looks like more snow is in the forcast. Was told that a commercial producer abou 40 miles south of us collected 500 gallons during the last warm spell.

[sweet acer]

Sap ran all day yesterday and flowed some last night, Will start our first cook today

[WRAcres]

I'm north of Duluth with most of my trees in deep woods with aspen, birch, balsam. I'm jealous; we stepped up to 50 taps this year and set them on 3-19. We've had a total of 3 gallons so far with only a handful of the trees actually producing. Snowshoe to all of them, and last night gathered a quart. All of our taps are on bags. Last year with 24 taps we had over 100 gallons and pulled them early. And looks like the buds are starting to swell on most of the trees.