November Journal

November is here and it will be sugaring season for some of us in just a couple of months. For me it will be February which is in about 3 months. I'm finally starting to get some stuff done now that I have recovered from a hernia repair last month.

I bought a new filter press for the coming season and had a chance to try it out yesterday. I ran about 16 gallons of commercial syrup through it and it never slowed down. The syrup wasn't very dirty so it wasn't a real test of what it will do with dirty syrup, but so far I'm impressed.

I also bought a syrup refractometer and tested some syrup samples with that. I think that it will speed up the density adjustment process over using the hydrometer and Accucup.

I've got a 10 wheeler load of gravel coming tomorrow to fill in a wet hole in the lower driveway to my sugar house. I'm hoping that one load will be enough but will buy as much as I need to get the driveway built up. That should make it a lot easier to plow the snow and get the tractor and sap trailer in and out when the frost comes out of the ground.

We had lots of wind recently, some trees down. Clean-up will start when the wind lets off.
We packed another barrel of Amber into retail containers last week. Next we will pack a barrel of Dark too. Getting ready for Christmas orders, which have already started to come in.

Leavin in the morning to pick up a new to me 2x6 Evaporator!! 6 hrs each way. Picking up mainline, tubing and 700 taps on the way home.
My goal is to tap during the first week of January. 500-700 taps this year.

I spent two days this week cutting limbs off lines. As of right now my woods looks very good. I will make another pass after deer season ends. I just ordered my CV 2 spouts this week.

Spud

Crew is out doing minor adjustments to several experiments, cutting up fallen limbs/trees after the last few wind storms, and clearing mainline paths for a 1,000 tap install for early next summer. We've tapped a small subset of trees for some taphole longevity and rejuvenation studies (3rd yr).

Bought 3 2,650 gal SS storage tanks earlier this fall. Got a great deal on them -- came out of a brewery. Should work well for our new installation/pumping project next summer.

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Folks,
2019 LEME day one, in the books! Awesome to visit with friends/ neighbors about maple. Great turn out!
Regards,
Chris

Last Saturday one of the rear tires on my IH tractor went flat. The wheel rusted through near the valve and the tube split. I took it to a local tire shop that has done tractor tires for me before. Well it's Thursday and I still haven't heard from them. I'm hoping that they can fix the wheel because I can't find a replacement. My tractor was manufactured with 32" wheels which is probably Canadian spec and US spec tractors have 28" wheels. Searching the internets I can find the 28" wheels but not the 32's.

At the end of last season the bearings in the high pressure pump on my RO were getting noisy. Last Sunday I took it apart to see how much needs to be replaced. After I find out how much my tractor tire is going to cost I call Lapierre to find out how much the RO parts are going to be. Oh the joys of owning old equipment!

I'm the farthest behind on firewood I've been since I started. I likely have about 85% done, split and stacked. Today I worked on it for about 2 hrs, with one of my grandsons. Tomorrow I may do some more. The logs are all cut and have been for 2 years. I'm just picking them with my excavator with a mechanical thumb, carry them to the spliter and buck them there. Then I split. Any that are too heavy to lift I set them on using the excavator and thumb. The spliter is a super split, which is fast so breaking them down to wrist size goes fast. I split into the bucket on my tractor, when that fills up I drive it to where I stack it. I likely only have about 4-5 more hours work to finish, but maybe longer because the Cherry I'm on now is getting to be big blocks, at about 20+" now, working toward the big end. These were very crooked limbs on the huge Cherry I had to take down, the big end is 38" diameter, but about 1/3 of the log is gone, the tree was struck by lightning many years ago, when I dropped the tree the remaining trunk for the lower 11' up was a big hollow, with only 4-6" remaining around the outside and a gaping hole about 2' wide on one face. It was a challenge to drop. Without the help of my excavator I'd have needed to hire a tree company to drop it.
As far as other prep for maple season, I've walked many of the lines. A lot of small and medium limbs down on the lines, only 2 bigger trees down. I can clean that up in a day or 2, with the help of the excavator.
I still have a barrel of dark awaiting the bottler. If it gets any colder, I'll need to use my heat pad that wraps around the barrel. That does a good job of warming a barrel in 2-3 hrs, enough to pump the contents to my finisher. I'd really like to finish the wood first, but tomorrow I will again be working on setting up a new battery bank on my battery back-up portion of my solar system and working the firewood back and forth. That needs to be operational in case the furnace and electric both fail. I then would use the battery bank to run an electric heater in my RO room. Down to about zero outdoors I can easily run 1 day, if the temp is 15F+ I can run 2 days. If I need it longer I'd need to run my genny to charge the battery bank. This bank is a LiFePo4 battery bank, with a heat pad to keep the bank above freezing. These batteries are damaged if charged when frozen. The heat pad runs off the batteries., just 65 watts. That's almost nothing for the LiFePo4 batteries (Lithium Iron Phosphate). The battery bank is in a small insulated enclosure.