Tapped in Lanark County

[ennismaple]

We got about halfed tapped from Thursday to Saturday. The going is really tough due to the deep snow. Spots where I was driving under mainlines in the fall I was walking over them. A lot of rail fences are completely under the snow and a large percentage of our mainlines and a fair amount of lateral lines were covered. The laterals I was able to pull up with the hammer while tapping but we're having to dig out a lot of the mainlines.

I decided to count how many taps we have since we've only ever guessed what the number was. Our Old Camp Hill has 435 taps, the Big Flat has 560 taps and the Big Hill has about 900 (I tapped 848 yesterday and there's about another 50 left to do).

We got our new vacuum pump running but it's not hooked up to the releaser yet. When you put your hand on top of the releaser side of the moisture trap you'd swear it'll suck the glove off your hand. After a few minutes fiddling with the flood oil screws and re-filling the oil filter we finally got the right number of drips so we should be good to go.

The sap ran a bit on Friday and we got the pumps on for the Old Camp and Big Flat on Saturday morning. We drained and cleaned the Zero tanks after lunch and we'll store the sap for later in the week when we should start boiling. We'll tap our New Bush and the Cottages Bush over the next couple days so we should be ready when the weather cooperates. I was too busy busting through snow for 3 days to take any pictures but I should get some next weekend.

[ennismaple]

We got the balance of all but one of our bushes tapped over Easter weekend. It was still too cold for the sap to run more than just a trickle from Friday to Sunday so we're still waiting to fire up the evaporator this year. I spent half of Friday shovelling out mainlines and the rest either tapping or working in our New Bush

The New Bush is up and running. Mainline fittings are in, saddle manifolds are on, the releaser is hooked up and ready to go and we're tapped. Yesterday it was cold and we'd tapped everything that was ready to tap so we decided to do more work in the new bush. In 5.5 hours we stretched 280 feet of steel, strapped the mainline, stretched laterals, cut in 124 droplines, installed the saddle manifolds and tapped. This bush is now up to 730 taps and we may get another couple hundred stretched if the weather stays cold as is forecast.

Now that we're almost tapped I've found out why our yield has been so poor in the past - we didn't have nearly as many taps as my father thought!!! We'd only ever guessed that we had 4,000 taps so I counted this year. With about 500 to 600 taps left to go in our count is at just under 3,000 of which 730 are brand new. This means that last year we had around 2800-2900 taps which means our yield was waaaay better than we thought. I always wondered why we didn't get anywhere near the 1 litre of syrup per tap that is supposed to be an "average" year!!!!

I took a bunch more pictures and have loaded some of them in my Photobucket account under the album "2008-03 Mar". Enjoy!

[H. Walker]

ennismaple, how do you keep track of your count when tapping pipeline? I seen someone put a hay-bailer trip-counter on the handle of their tapper, but I always figured that I would be bumping the count up by accident.

[ennismaple]

I simply kept track in my head. I know my count wasn't perfect but it's probably plus or minus 10. All I cared about was order of magnitude anyways.

You made any syrup down south yet?

[H. Walker]

I'm just 30 minutes south of you, but I guess that does make a little difference. I finally got enough sap today to start a boil.

[ennismaple]

We're boiling today (Thursday) for the first time. We had enough sap by the end of last week that we could have sweetened the pans but it had been sitting in the tanks for a week so it was too cloudy and we dumped it. I hope you get more sap than you can handle!