Eastern Ontario 2023

Still running great here today again.I have more than i need ( actually too much!) and my equipment is all sterilized and packed away 'til next year.
I will be bottling this week and then it's brook trout fishing and firewood!

Smaller but steady runs, still getting about 30l a day. Only one tree has dried up.

Quick question (to be cross-posted to The Sugar Inn)...how many of you have heard the old trope of sticking a hunk of wood in a spile hole, supposedly to prevent bugs and infection from setting it?

My neighbour, a total sugaring noob, told me that he did that to his trees after reading about doing it on the interwebz.

Knowing his background as a paramedic, I pointed out that with a wound, you have to flush it out.

'Yeah', he said, 'then you pack it'.

To which I retorted: 'Yeah, with something sterile, not bits of stick off the ground.' I had clearly got up his a$$ somewhat by then, so said no more (he's now a cop lol).

Still, where did this old wives tale originate?!

I sure wouldn’t do it. Only thing that goes in my tree hole is the spile.

Same here, and Bruce also backed me up on The Sugar Inn. But someone try telling this noob that. Taps 6 Freemans for 2 weeks using a kit from CT and now he's an expert lol

Very bad idea. Delays taphole closure and provides a place where microbes can get it and spread. The stick/dowel (whatever is put in the taphole) will collect water and rot, and create a place where rot can spread from. Just leave the taphole alone and the tree will be just fine.

I sure hope he thinks twice and does remove the sticks himself.

My trees are drying up fast, pulled half my spiles yesterday. Some trees still have perfect sap, but very little, and a couple of the keeners are still producing but it's getting cloudy. Ah well I have over 700l sap and 6 batches. Have a lot of hotpacking to do today and a final tally, along with finishing off #6.

It was a challenging weekend... power went out 3pm on Wednesday mid-boil. Thursday was spent cutting trees and limbs off of roads and mainlines and trying to rig up generators to complete the RO rinse and run vacuum pumps. Power came back on midday Friday. Then we noticed the concentrate in the flue pan had gone snotty and had to be dumped - that hurt to see the equivalent of 30+ gallons of syrup being wasted. The sap never really ran well through the weekend even though conditions were almost ideal. Sunday the syrup re-heater stopped working and had to replace the element. Sap was coming in at 1.5 Brix yesterday. I hope to have enough sap by later today to get one last, short boil and push as much sugar through as possible and hopefully get some Very Dark, assuming the pans don't turn on me again.

Overall it's been a 'Meh' season. The sap never really ran well. At least the syrup quality has been great. We had lots of equipment breakdowns to overcome and other challenges. Now I'm praying for this hot weather later in the week so I don't have to pull taps in the snow!

This was a weird season fpr sure. Started out with sky-high sugar content around 27:1 ratio, last batch was 41:1 :-/ Flow was pretty steady, no massive tsunamis or spikes in production like usual; this was also the very first year that I didn't have to break out the 5g collecting pails.

But the flavours are really good and I detect a slightly creamy/buttery note in #4 which I don't believe I've had before. Scraped together enough to do a 6th batch so may get a Very Dark out of it.

Had a decent boil last night and made some good Very Dark - Strong syrup to finish up the year. I boiled a few hundred gallons of permeate through behind the concentrate to get as many runoffs as possible. We ended up about 10% less than what is our 5 year average.

We definitely pushed to the absolute end. We got 250 gallons of rather ugly looking sap from one 1200 tap woods in 18 hours since we gathered yesterday afternoon. It will be used to flood the pans for the next few months.

Hey all, sorry for what ought to be a post in Classifieds, but I keep getting logged out.

If anyone is getting rid of their old 7/16ths sharkfins, let me know! I will gladly buy ones that are in good shape.