Tapped and nothing

I was wondering the same thing as far as length of the season but we still have about 30% snow cover up here so it's early. I have been talking to guys that have been fixing broken water mains and they are saying the frost is 6' + in the ground, should take a while for that to thaw.

We also had wind today from the south west, about 1/2 of the taps were running. One of the new roadside trees was almost full tonight, I thought maybe somebody was messing with me, as they are in town. I kept the sap separate and checked it when I got home and it was right at 2%.

MapleMounder

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I switched to natural gas from fuel oil. So I was a little gun shy on putting all my buckets out until I knew if I had enough heat. I put in a 300,000 BTU burner. I have no idea how many BTU's the fuel oil burner produced. But I think I was running a 6.5 gallon per hour orifice. I am very glad I did not hang them all! I am very behind. what used to take 3 1/2 to 4 hours to cook off is taking 12 plus. Oye..
sure am glad I do not have 140 buckets out there...
so far only about 360 gallon of sap. up I also only have 65 buckets out.
thinking about making a homemade burner for under the syrup half of the pan and extending the flame nozzle of the main burner so it is really only heating the drop flue half of the pan.

okay so all last week on two taps I only ended up with 4 gallons. Tree ran a little weird. This is a black maple. I was wondering if you think this season is still going or done? I saw some silvers have a bunch of buds on them and from what I heard you see that your done. What do you guys think?

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Originally Posted by DarkEvilDead

okay so all last week on two taps I only ended up with 4 gallons. Tree ran a little weird. This is a black maple. I was wondering if you think this season is still going or done? I saw some silvers have a bunch of buds on them and from what I heard you see that your done. What do you guys think?

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where in Il are you?
Here in central Il, I do not think we are done. I collected 85 gal today but it was on the cold side, the only things running were on the sunny side of the trees. the north side of the trees still had ice frozen in the tap. yesterday I had mostly dry taps. if the forecasts are close then we should get some nice runs later in the week.
When did you tap?

The sunny days are the best for sap runs with temps in upper 30's to lower 40s. Needs to come off an evening of below freezing temps for several hours min.
I tapped on march 15, have 27 taps, collected 153 gallons so far with some in the buckets. The last day I collected was Saturday and that was only 10 gallons. It looks like Wed will be ok but Sat even better, then Tue. - Thur. I'm in North central Illinois, Rockford area. Hang in there don't pull those taps, hopefully a couple of more weeks as long as we don't see to many days in the 60's.