Today must have been a good day! Heading down to my sugarbush tomorrow and hoping to have a nice amount waiting for me. Hopefully the rest of you are too busy boiling tonight to post!
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Today must have been a good day! Heading down to my sugarbush tomorrow and hoping to have a nice amount waiting for me. Hopefully the rest of you are too busy boiling tonight to post!
We finished up the rest of our vacuum taps yesterday, we’re finally catching up. Right at 300 total & I think we’ll have another 20-30 on bags.
Our trees were running like faucets around 3 yesterday & it didn’t get very cold overnight so today should be another good one.
I went down today with only 4 hours to collect, and found 250 gallons. And my well pump froze so I had to pump the sap to my truck with my lunchbox vacuum (5 gallons every excruciating 10 minutes for those wondering). Brought 90 gallons home to r/o since all I had time to do was pump. Left the rest, worried it may spoil tomorrow. Doing the r/o thing tonight and boiling tomorrow. Great haul, just wish I had more time!
We started the RO last night. We had 825 in the tanks at 7:45PM, and another 180 came in overnight.
We're starting to think maybe with switching more taps to vacuum we went too small with the RO.
But we can always boil raw sap if we have to.
Well, yesterday was a day of contrasts...I'm not even sure how much sap we got all together, but when we started our 545 gallon tank was almost full of concentrate. When we tested it during the day it was 5.7%. Among the mishaps:
Hose from the RO to the tank froze in the middle of the night
Drawoff valve keeps sticking open (new valve is on the way)
Seal on the front float box is not sealing all of the time, float box almost overflowed (new seal is on the way)
While the float box issue was at its worst I boiled over the finisher, probably lost a half gallon or so.
Made a new hose too long & almost burnt through it while filtering. It's a bit shorter now :)
But, in the end we bottled about 20 gallons, and have around 10 more to bottle. And we got a new 400-gallon stainless tank ready to use.
So it turned out to be a decent day.
Thinking we may be done. My trees have not started budding as they are all about 100' high and in a forest so they lag behind trees with more exposure, but I went down to my property Sunday and got 60 gallons off of 100 taps, yesterday and got 25 gallons, and today and got 5. At 150 miles round trip, that ain't worth it. Considering pulling the taps, but if we get a cold snap could I get another run? Thoughts? Just not sure waiting longer is worth the risk of spoiled sap.
You're not that much further north than me Andrew. We collected our last sap last weekend, and after what should of been a good flow Sunday there was nothing. Season was about average for us overall - about 6 weeks. We had a few warm days but nothing extended to really shut us down like 2 years ago when we had a week of 60 and 70 degree days
It pretty much dried up for me. I pulled the taps last night.
We're hoping to catch one more run this weekend, and then we're done.
Same here, this weekend looks like that's probably the end. Our trees were still running last night at around 9:30, but its really cold & windy today. Tomorrow should be a really good day after it warms up.
Fortunately we had enough sap left on Wednesday night that we can boil sap instead of syrup for our open house on Saturday, but it looks like most people doing Maple Weekend next weekend will be boiling water.
That being said, we may run out of wood before we run out of sap if they run past Sunday.