farthest from the sugarhouse you tap?

[ctjim]

i may have the oppurtunity to gain access to some new woods to tap, lots of sugars supposedly and my trouble now is my home bush is all reds, not so great for making syrup. only problem is new woods are about 15 miles from the sugarhouse. i'm thinking its just a bit too far to travel and by the time everything is all said and done it would cost me more than it is worth. just wondering what everyone else does?

[jasonl6]

Depends on the amount of taps. We have some local producers here that have 10,000 + tap bushes almost 1 hour from the house. They have a 5,000 gal fire truck they use to haul sap.

Jason

[Maplewalnut]

I look at a number of factors. Since I work full time about 12 miles away, anything along that route is fair game. If I find a group of roadsides with at least 6-8 big trees I am knocking on doors asking. As far as a whole bush...can you use tube, vacuum? what is accessability like? Personally I think its a lot different if you have to spend time emptying buckets instead of pumping out a single bulk tank especially if you traveling 30 miles round trip to do so. I also look at elevation...I have one bush along a creek that starts running a week or so earlier than my woods. Its bordered on both sides by fields, gets lots of sun and is about 500 ft lower in elevation. It helps me fine tune things before the BIG SAP arrives!

[Haynes Forest Products]

My bush is 7 miles from the sugar shack and I make the trip 4 times a day. It also includes stops at 2 other operations all the way for good old time bull sessions and rehidration:)

[vtmaplemaker]

my big bush 4000 taps is about 12 miles away, and I have made as many as 10 trips to haul sap in a days time.. If you want the taps bad enough you will travel for them.

[red maples]

my trouble now is my home bush is all reds, not so great for making syrup.

What ever you do it will be an investment in time and money. Figure our what you wanna do first, and see how much time you wanna spend collecting, and decide what is best for you since you will be driving about 20-25 minutes give or take one way.

the number of taps will determine how much sap you need to haul. tubing with or with out vaccum will cut down drastically on collection times over buckets.

Oh and 1 thing I tap most reds and I think they make great syrup!:)

[ctjim]

What ever you do it will be an investment in time and money. Figure our what you wanna do first, and see how much time you wanna spend collecting, and decide what is best for you since you will be driving about 20-25 minutes give or take one way.

the number of taps will determine how much sap you need to haul. tubing with or with out vaccum will cut down drastically on collection times over buckets.

Oh and 1 thing I tap most reds and I think they make great syrup!:)

don't get me wrong redmaples i love the taste of syrup from the reds. but most of my home bush is flat and way away from any power source for running vac. i keep milling the idea of 1 of those gas pumps goodrich's sells then running tubing but again i have almost flat land at home, and i'm not so sure i could even get enough slope w/out tapping off about a 8ft ladder.

[PATheron]

How many taps do you think you have at home on the reds?

[PATheron]

If you have plenty of trees at home even though they are reds there are some big advantages to tapping at home. You can work on it an hour everyday and it really adds up. You can keep real good track of it in season. The stuff is all on your own land and you dont get kicked off. It probly wont ever perform like a steep side hill but you can still do it. Probly the way Id do it is try to slope the mainline even if its just a little and its real high at the end. Run the lats short and run more mainline close together to get good vac. Invert the lats at the end and dont worry if they are all flat. Run a dry line on every main so that all the sap runs into the wet and even if the wet is totally flat it can slug and with the dry it wont mess up the vac transfer. More of a pain but I bet you could get it to perform pretty good and youd own it and you can putz on it all the time. Theron

[maple flats]

My farthest last season and this coming is 7 miles. The last 2 years I hauled with a 165 gal tank in the truck (half ton) and before that I hauled with a 125 in the truck. This next year I am going back to the 125 in the truck and hook a trailer behind to carry the 165. This will give me 290. Next year I plan to buy a heavier truck and get a bigger tank to haul, maybe with a trailer too.
Get the sap where you can. You should also do as much with your own too, but I would get the new lease going first before the opportunity is lost to some other producer or the landowner changes their mind.

[red maples]

I have a similiar problem with my reds the land is flat and my sugarhouse is at the edge of the swamp/flood plain if you wanna call it that. (butits all at my house and theron said if I got a few minutes an hour, what ever I can go out and see how things are run some tubing etc. its very convientent. ) it is very flat but last year I had a bad problem with flooding so I had to raise up the tanks to prevent them from getting full of swamp water. so I built a plattform to put the tank on and in turn had to put in a sap lift. It's only 7 feet but I am hoping all will work out good. we'll see come the spring. With the reds they can be troublesome. but hook them up to vac and they run like crazy!!! I say invest in the reds first even though its flat and maximize your profits, so to speak at home first then worry about the one 15 miles away.

[ctjim]

well even my home bush w/ the reds isn't really out the backdoor so to speak it's on my familys farm which is about a 8min. from my house, which is also where the sugarhouse is. 1 problem w/ the reds at the home bush is they're in big groups and spread out. right now i have some on gravity and some on buckets and my cousin has a nice setup right next to his parents house, also on the property where the sugarhouse is, thats about 150 on vac but that is literally out the back door. after thinning at the home farm i could probably come in around 500taps all together, but then i would probably need about 2 vac setups which wouldn't be so bad if i got the sap puller types. i would just need to develop each seperate area of reds 1 at a time.