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Just under .42/tap here. All excellent quality except the last batch that was good cooking syrup. About 60% GD, 25% AR, 10% DR and 5% VDS. Considering the challenging weather and the fact that I did not have all my taps in right from the beginning, I'm very happy with how the season wrapped up.
We made 5.17 gallons of total syrup this year. Just a little over a gallon of golden and the rest amber. We did not have a good start but it seamed to catch up at the end, only a little too late. We only averaged .246 gallons per tap. We are at 2150' elevation and the trees just stayed frozen longer. We had six boils and the final one was 4/19. We only had two decent runs and there rest were ok. There is always next year.
We got about half our normal crop. Great tasting syrup this year, and very high sugar in the sap. Also low invert, or at least lower than we usually see. We had a very short window for sap production. As soon as the days stopped freezing, so did the nights. 2 weeks of weather in the 50s with little snow cover makes a short season for us.
Nova Scotia, very bad.
We traditionally don't get near the taps/gallon ratio as in other regions anyway, but this year was another world of bad all together. Like maybe around 0.02 gallons CDN per tap of bad.
(Yes, the decimal point is in the right place...)
As Red Green would say "we're all in this together"! I'm in the UP of Michigan, and I only got .05gpt. Probably worse than that but I'm rounding up on the syrup total.
I tapped only 7 trees this year. Couldn't get to the rest when weather was good for running. By the time i was able to get into the woods the season was over. I did fairly well for what i was able to tap. From the 7 trees i got around 1 and a half gallons. Mostly all amber. My road trees did great. Some days got five gallons a day. Made up for the few in woods that barely if lucky gave a gallon a day. Not sure on sugar content but every five gallons i got made me a pint of extra thick syrup. I bring mine 9 degrees over boiling to make it little thicker.
2300 gallons on 5800 taps this year. Which is .40 gallons per tap. not bad
1247gals.Mostly light.Last 2 brls were off flavor.Non vac. didnt do squat.(400 taps) We took 16000gals off our small bush with 870 taps.Pretty good year
I had my 3rd best season ever. I made 178 gallons from 690 vacuum taps and 85 gravity taps. On Easter Sunday I accidentally pumped the concentrate from 600 gallons down the drain that would have yielded another 12 plus gallons of syrup. I also didn't boil out the evaporator at the end of the season and probably would have hit 200 gallons doing that and with the accident which would have put me at .25gpt. I tap mostly red maples and hitting .25gpt or higher is pretty tough. Most of my syrup was Amber with the rest being Golden. The last boil yielded 16 gallons of off flavored and ropey syrup. (That's why I didn't boil out the evaporator.)
Well this was my rookie year and it didn't turn out so well. My plan was to make enough syrup to sell at local farmers markets so I could get the kids involved in money management as well as working with me in the bush. My research pointed toward 45-50 taps to make 10 gallons of syrup or so and that a 2X5 would handle the sap in an acceptable amount of boiling time while allowing for growth. I bought a bag of 100 CV2's and the urge to use them all was too great so I thought...ok 20 gallons would be good to make.
Then reality hit me square in the butt, 82 taps went in the first weekend in March and the remainder went in the 2 weeks following. Final total was 103 taps on gravity. I had one day when the sap "ran" and the rest of the time was barely a drip. Total SAP collected off of all taps was 205 gallons from the first weekend in March till two weekends ago, that's 1.99 gallons of sap per tap for my entire season. Final syrup about 2 2/3 gallons. I had a loss of semi syrup in the pan via a drip I forgot about in my homemade float box which was heartbreaking....there was probably a gallon in that so overall it would have been 3 2/3 gallons for the season. Similar to Mel in my mother province of Nova Scotia, I had 0.025 gallons of syrup per tap
My wife asked if I was going to sell the pan and give up.....this is where the syrup sickness kicks in...my response was, "No...of course not, I have a plan for next year." She then asked if it would cost more money....me,"ahhhh, yeah a little but not as much as I have invested so far...". Her response was non verbal after that.
I may be in trouble, both mentally and maritally!
Rob