Checking what VT sugar makers are doing

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Originally Posted by spud

Dr. Tim. It looks like you will hit your .6 for the season. I wish I could hit those numbers but my sugar content is to low for a season average. How many GPT of sap did you get?

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Yes, we'll definitely hit 0.6 gal/tap sometime today before we put the season to bed. Sap ran pretty well overnight (until about 2am), and is starting to run again today (we had a good freeze overnight). Syrup we made yesterday was quite nice....with a strong caramel flavor. I haven't crunched all the numbers yet, but it looks like we're right around 29-30+ gal sap per/tap for most of our woods overall. Our sugar content hasn't been real bad. We dropped down to 1.5 Brix at one point, but that's about the lowest. Most of the time it's been right around 1.8-2.0 Brix (a little lower than normal, but not a lot).

I am going to pull the plug today. It was a very good season for me. I came up short on hitting my .5GPT once again this season. My sugar average for the season was 1.6%. Kids are on vacation this coming week so it's a great time to pull spouts and clean up. My apple trees come next friday and my bees shortly after that. Good luck to all those still running.

Spud

Sap ran good yesterday once the sun cam out. Collected almost a gpt. I plan to boil today and clean out the evaporator tomorrow. Hoping for another 100 gal of syrup. The syrup has no off flavor that I can detect. This has been a great season for the high hill producers. Certainly my best ever as I may double the production from my previous "best" year. Some of the increase is due to increased efficiency. But most of it I attribute to the weather. It was really perfect up in the hills. Never too hot, and a lot of frozen nights.

Best of luck to anyone still producing.

Ben

We finished boiling incoming sap and then boiling out the pans around 8pm last night. Total of 2,612 gal, 6.75 lbs/tap, or 0.61 gal/tap, which for us is just a little above average. Sap was decent quality right to the end, about 1.6 Brix.

I pulled the plug Saturday too. Started pulling taps Saturday afternoon. Finished up sunday, and got the tank all cleaned up. Been a good season. I got a little over 20gal/tap this year.

We stopped Saturday also. Emptied back pan into front pan yesterday and ended with 838 gallons for the season.

Dr Perkins, when are we going to release the result of this year test? Tapping below the lateral or hybrid vacuum system(3/16 vs 5/16) etc...

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Originally Posted by levasse12

Dr Perkins, when are we going to release the result of this year test? Tapping below the lateral or hybrid vacuum system(3/16 vs 5/16) etc...

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I'll be speaking at the Leader Evaporator Co. Open House this Friday and Saturday about our two years of "Tapping Below the Lateral" research and about our work with Cornell (Steve Childs) on "Tubing/Spout Cleaning or Replacement?" I'll also be presenting those two talks at Bascom the following weekend. The tapping below the lateral will be presented at the NAMSC meeting in Burlington in October, at LEME in November, and at the VT January Conferences in Jan 2017....and in other places where I'm invited and am able to attend over the summer and fall. It'll likely be published in the "Maple Digest" within about a year.

The 3/16" vs 5/16" on high vacuum will come out a bit later probably. Still have to pull spouts and inspect out in that section of the woods before we can finalize the story on that one.

Maybe you could tell us if its similar to last years result or not.(for those who could not come to any open house)

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Originally Posted by levasse12

Maybe you could tell us if its similar to last years result or not.(for those who could not come to any open house)

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That would just spoil the fun wouldn't it? Seriously though, while we do present it at meetings, if it is a NAMSC sponsored study, we will publish it (put it down in writing) in the Maple Digest first.....not online.

I look forward to reading the results on tapping below the lateral lines. I had asked Dr. Tim about this a few years back and he said they were doing a study on it. This season I tapped over 1000 trees below the lateral lines. Some were 12-16 inches below. I had a record season for GPT this year. My overall production was .4+ for the season but that is great for me and my smaller trees. My sugar average for the season was just 1.5%. Had it been 2% like some sugar makers I would have had a .54 GPT season. I feel I'm doing as well as I can with the trees I have to work with. All 1000+ trees I tapped below the lateral line was with CV2 spouts.

Spud

Good information spud, thanks for sharing. We didn't tap any below this year but I am tempted to try it. We don't use the CV2's, just CDL smartspouts. Hoping I can make it down to Bascom's open house next weekend and get to Dr. Tim's presentations.

2000 taps on laterals set up for tapping with 3' of snow in mind. No snow this year = 75% ? tapped below the lateral. (often the length of the drop). 26 GPT on sap this year and stopped a few days early to go to work. Higher than avg year for sugar content ended up @ .61 GPT on syrup. I am mainly a sap seller and produce just a little syrup. 3rd year on the tubing and battled a leak at the pump house that caused a lot of ice issues this year.

Received a few private messages on how we did. Well, as of yesterday, still boiling. I had to take an assignment to Miami, FL so the family is handling the operation. NEK received several inches of snow yesterday so sap will prob flow into the weekend. Total numbers will be high but not in Dr. Perkin's territory.

Good luck, sjdoyon. Let us know when you wrap up.

Got numbers from the guy who buys our sap from our big sugarbush. Off of 9900 taps he picked up 341,000 gallons of sap which came to be 5791.1 gallons of syrup. 0.585 gal syrup per tap. I'm hoping that bush can do better in a higher sugar content year. I don't have any totals for our Westford bush where we have 2500 taps and buy some sap and boil it ourselves.

I was paid for this years sap this weekend, and like my season, there were up and downs. Last year I was all gravity, and off of 350 taps I produced 2000 gal, and all season long I was between 2-3%. This year I made the jump to vac, and produced more then 4 times the sap. I ended the year with 8,850 gallons, but my sugar content averaged 1.2%, with the last 3-4 pick-ups at the end of the season only being 0.6%! Needless to say I quadrupled my sap production but only doubled my money. Ouch

That us a ton of sap for 9900 taps. What was you average suge for the season?

Spud

Research has been done showing that sugar content will not drop under very high vacuum. I am convinced that sugar will drop under high vacuum. There are too many sugar makers proving this is the case. My neighbor set up a small woods this season and ran an old dairy pump at just 17 inches. His trees are just feet from mine and of the same size. His sugar average for the season was 2.1% and mine was 1.5% on 27+ inches of vacuum. Are set ups are the same with three taps per lateral line. High vacuum does help to increase production but if you can double or triple your gallons of sap don't expect to do the same with syrup.

Spud

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Originally Posted by spud

Research has been done showing that sugar content will not drop under very high vacuum. I am convinced that sugar will drop under high vacuum.

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Your characterization of the research is not quite correct. The devil is always in the details.

When the sap is running from both trees on vacuum and trees on gravity, sugar content will be roughly the same. After a few days though, the trees on gravity will stop running (= zero sugar), while the trees on vacuum will keep running, and eventually you will reach a time when the bulk flow sap movement is upward (from the soil, through the roots, up the stem and out the taphole). Without a freeze to stimulate the conversion of stored starch to sugar, the sugar in the roots and stem will slowly be diluted and sugar content will drop off. However again....the trees on gravity are producing NO sugar during this phase. Thus the sugar content is going to vary during the season according to the flow regime.

Altogether I guess I'm saying the research isn't wrong, but neither are you. :)

I think it was 1.5%.

Figured I would post on here as I'm getting pretty excited for the season. When are you all planning to tap? Maybe i'm the only one excited and nobody is really browsing the Trader yet. We have only a day or two of woods work left before being ready to tap. I'm ready to tap now as long as the weather would remain cold through the first of January, but my dad is not so sure. We have 13K to do this year and I like the idea of tapping with minimal snow, having more time to tap so we don't have to rush or hire a lot of outside help, and being ready for an early or mid January run. I really think it's in our (and maybe most sugarmakers) economic interest to be all tapped in by mid January. Sure it's a headache to deal with all the cold and draining the evaporator for a cold spell, etc, but financially I think it i makes sense. What do you all think? Anyway, we definitely will begin by January 1 or earlier and I'm excited for what the season has in store. Here is a 2008 publication by Tim Wilmot regarind the timing of tapping. http://www.uvm.edu/~pmrc/tapping.pdf I found it very interesting and it certainly challenges the conventional timing of tapping.

I plan to pick up my CV2 spouts next week. My buddy from Alaska will be arriving on the 22nd of January and we will start tapping soon after. He plans to stay until we are all done. Im looking forward to a very productive season with no break downs. Haha. Good luck everyone.

Spud

Started tapping on the 3rd. Should be done the woods around our house by Sunday and then onto the big bush in Jericho. Looks like I'll be walking lines on Wednesday!

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Originally Posted by WestfordSugarworks

Started tapping on the 3rd. Should be done the woods around our house by Sunday and then onto the big bush in Jericho. Looks like I'll be walking lines on Wednesday!

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Great! I hope you guys have a great year!
Neil

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Originally Posted by spud

I plan to pick up my CV2 spouts next week. My buddy from Alaska will be arriving on the 22nd of January and we will start tapping soon after. He plans to stay until we are all done. Im looking forward to a very productive season with no break downs. Haha. Good luck everyone.

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Send him over to our place when you're done and he can help our tapping crew. :)

Best of luck to everyone with the 2017 season. See you on the other side.

Hello fellow Vt maple masters. We have been making a lot of changes around here. Three of us have got together to combine our forces on one focus this year. We have the sugarhouse now just about in order, new to us 3.5 x10' D&G rig, new to us lapierre RO things are going to be fun. Focusing now on the woods work. Starting this weekend in the 1200 tap bush,making repairs and tightening things up. then moving on to the others. We still need to service vac pump and clean releaser. The other bush I will be fixing all damaged lateral runs with 3/16, as there's the perfect slope for this type setup.We will be watching the weather closer towards the end of this month. Not getting to antsy yet, haven't even seen the drill, let alone found the batteries.
Hope you all have a great season.
JBM maple
Parker Maple

It looks like a bunch of rain and warmer weather in the next ten days for my area. I don't think I'm missing out on and sap yet. There is some bare ground spots in the woods and it will not hurt my feelings to have no snow on the ground while tapping. The ground is saturated with water this year. Waiting for my 4-wheeler to get out of the shop and then I will start cutting limbs on lines and tightening up laterals. I have a really good feeling about this season and I hope for big numbers. I just had a series of Steroid injections in my low back so I'm hoping this will allow me to get the job done.

Spud

I just started putting my sugarhouse back together. used it as a lumber mill/storage as I was building my addition/house this summer. got in the woods yesterday afternoon for a few hours... lots of limbs down. I have a few more hours of work there.
Spud, if your steroid injections worked as well as mine did you'll be back to normal soon. I had to do two sessions because I had 2 discs that were totally herniated. it worked well the first time but was still struggling. a week after the second one, I was back to 100%. good luck with it! one hard thing I learned from it was to not keep on doing things with the same muscles every time... like swing the axe with the left hand dominate, then the next with the right! having a bad back is not fun at all!

We got tapped in at our home bush (3k taps) in time for the run that started yesterday morning. So far have pulled about 5000 gallons of sap that averages 1.2 brix. Don't have the RO ready to go to concentrate and running out of storage so we had to call someone to come buy a truckload of sap. We still will be sitting on full tanks until early next week when we'll get the RO going and concentrate, collect more and boil. Pretty excited to be tapped and pulling high vac.

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Originally Posted by tcross

I just started putting my sugarhouse back together. used it as a lumber mill/storage as I was building my addition/house this summer. got in the woods yesterday afternoon for a few hours... lots of limbs down. I have a few more hours of work there.
Spud, if your steroid injections worked as well as mine did you'll be back to normal soon. I had to do two sessions because I had 2 discs that were totally herniated. it worked well the first time but was still struggling. a week after the second one, I was back to 100%. good luck with it! one hard thing I learned from it was to not keep on doing things with the same muscles every time... like swing the axe with the left hand dominate, then the next with the right! having a bad back is not fun at all!

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tcross thanks for the info. I will be going back for round two in 4 weeks. I hope my injections help as much as yours did. I have already had two disks taking out and had a double fusion surgery. The disk above the fusion is almost gone now. If I was a horse they would have shot me by now. Best of luck in the 2017 season.

We have a few people in town making syrup now. One neighbor made 8 barrels yesterday. It looks like those who are tapped in will be getting lots of sap by the end of next week. Unfortunately I will miss out on this warm spell but hope to be up and running by the end of the month when everything goes back into deep freeze.:lol: Westfordsugarworks I think your in for a ton of sap in the next ten day. Your numbers last year were very impressive and I look forward to seeing how you do this year. Best of luck to you and all Traders this season.

Spud

Spud, good luck with your back. It must be really hard having all the sugarwoods to manage but having constant pain when trying to get things done. Yeah, looks like we will have a lot of sap. We weren't anticipating so much these last couple days so we didn't get the RO out of it's winter storage, but we should have. I'm really optimistic that our Westford bush will have high numbers and we should do ok in Jericho too, especially if we can get a bunch of trees drilled before Tuesday. Good luck to all!

So from the forecast this week is looking awfully sugaring season here in Central VT, anyone tapping in this early on buckets ? I am debating it, but not sure if the taps I do now will last the entire season into April... Thoughts ? Thinking of tapping some reds as I think they will run sooner ?

So not ready on the arch/shack... but I never am :o

This year I'm joining the ranks of the early tappers. Started yesterday after spending a bunch of time this fall improving some areas where I had more taps/lateral than is ideal, and after changing out many drops. I had quite a bit of blowdown this year and some other major repairs to do as well. I'm hoping to take advantage of the lack of snow and warm days over the next week to get a bunch tapped. Still have a bunch of drops to replace but I think I can meet my goal of being 100% tapped and ready in the woods by the time we start getting consistent sap.

Not much to do in the sugarhouse to get ready except for a minor ceramic blanket repair in the arch, and rinse the ro. Hoping for no major equipment issues.....

General I think you are making a wise choice. I think your going to be making syrup by the end of the week. The 10 forecast in my area has dropped a bit and there may not be a bunch of syrup made in the next 2 weeks but in your area i think it's going to be good. Please keep us posted as to how many gallons you make.

Spud

Sap has been running a little bit on gravity....just rinsing lines at this point. Hoping to hit 400 taps in today and then turning on the vac. pump. Forecast for next week is trending colder so not sure how much syrup will be made but I'll take it.

I went to turn on the vac. pump on Friday evening after getting over 400 taps in last week and the pump was siezed. It has stuck in the past due to mineral scale build up (liquid ring pump with water for cooling), but never this bad. Spoke to a CDL tech and today had a chance to take it apart and get the impeller moving. No big deal and now it is pulling 27" after fixing a few leaks. Sap is running a bit....but nothing too impressive. Not sure what this week will bring but I'll leave the pump on until it freezes up again.

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Originally Posted by GeneralStark

I went to turn on the vac. pump on Friday evening after getting over 400 taps in last week and the pump was siezed. It has stuck in the past due to mineral scale build up (liquid ring pump with water for cooling), but never this bad. Spoke to a CDL tech and today had a chance to take it apart and get the impeller moving. No big deal and now it is pulling 27" after fixing a few leaks. Sap is running a bit....but nothing too impressive. Not sure what this week will bring but I'll leave the pump on until it freezes up again.

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I put glycol in my water cooled pump to store it. That was what Cdl told me to do. Haven't had a problem with it seized up. Maybe this will help

I got a feeling cold weather is coming again, long range looked cold for a few weeks. Hope there wrong like it usually is.

about 1000 taps away from being all done tapping. Will be happy to have a few weeks of cold to fix the long list of things that we've noticed while tapping and just relax for a few days. We've been pretty much flat out. So grateful for people that come to help us. Made 60 gallons on Sunday and the guy we sell our sap to hauled away about 17,000 gals of sap from our big bush. Good luck to all.