2008 Season West Virginia Mapler

I tapped about 230 taps this morning. It turned into a beautiful day. This is about a week earlier than normal, but I have too many taps for a full time job and living almost 30 minutes from the sugarhouse. The bush I tapped today was a south side bush and should run good if I can keep the squirrels out of it. It had a ton of damage this year, nothing like I have ever seen before. I fixed everything about 4 to 6 weeks ago and they got creative this time. They chewed the tubing in two and then drug aprox 6' long pieces down to a nice flat spot and then chewed away. I have never seen anything like it before and I hope I never do again. They hit about 3 places like that since I had fixed everything. I sanitize all the taps with alcohol, so maybe that will deter them.

It is about 45 today, no clouds and no wind, a beautiful day but no sap was running when I finished tapping about 12:30. It is supposed to be 46 tommorrow, 48 monday and 60 tuesday before getting colder again.

The plan is at this point to try to tap the other south side bush that has about 115 to 120 taps on it in about 10 to 14 days and the other bush which is on the north side and has about 160 taps, I would like to wait until Feb 20th or March 1st if possible to help drag out the season. The north side bush runs really good, but it is always much colder and the ground stays frozen sometimes 2 weeks longer. This way I can drag out the season a little longer and I am not covered up until March.

Season usually is over here around March 20th, but if I can wait until around the first of March to tap the north bush, it could help extend it some if I an not sick of it by then. I would like to have 500+ gallon to boil off next Sat, but with the squirrels and the weather, who knows. I have never had much luck making syrup this early, but we don't normally get weather like this either. The sun sure felt awful powerful today.

Good Luck Brandon and enjoy the season!

Have fun and we will keep our fingers crossed for you.

I hope you find an answer to those squirrels, that's down right aggravating to have to do that kind of repairing. Do you use anything to clean your tubing that might be inviting them to chew the tubing looking for something inside?

Brandon,
My wife has a friend who's husband is a Semi-Professional squirrel hunter. He killed a basket full of them bastards one day on my place, in Grant County, I wish he would have killed two baskets full. I still had unbelievable damage this year. I tapped one section on Jan.30. They was running pretty good before they froze up that night, however my season maybe finished due to the ice we had Friday, After it quit raining friday I rode back on the mountain on the four wheeler, Didn't stay long, trees were crashing all around me, extremely dangerous, Then to add insult to injury it started snowing at dark Friday and the wind picked up! I had to work at my real job Sat. Planning on checking the damage on Super Sunday. I don'tknow how much stress a Maple can handle. Leaking from all those broken branches and tapping also????. I've never experenced this before.

Mark 220 Maple

Mark,

I hate to hear that and that is terrible. Fortunately for me the wind blew very hard all night and the next day, so it kept the water off of the trees so it didn't have much time to freeze.

Sure hope it won't be as bad as you expected. It should run like gangbusters the next 3 days.

As far as tubing, I guess I have a squirrel adicted to chlorine. I have flushed for years with a small amount of chlorine when I flush my lines. Won't be doing that again. I am not sure that is what it is, but I would guess it likely is. I have killed 3, guess just not the right one as the squirrels were more scarce this year than I have ever seen them.

Brandon
Sounds like you need to sponser a big squirrel hunt.

Andyp

alot of the people around here i know have switched to peroxide instead of bleach .. we get moose eating and ripping every where
think a squirrel can drag line off can u imagine what a moose will do i also think i had a bear dump a tank on me ...and once i found a red squirrel in a bucket just standing in the drinking ... as i walked up the bucket was movng way more then the wind was blowing .. and anyone ever have a bird fly out at u

Brandon I've had plenty of squirrel damage over the past 19 years. It did not matter whether I had washed with chlorine or not. Some of the worst I had was 1 yr old tubing and and not rinsed with chlorine at all just plain water.
Years ago we were feeding a lot of ear corn and we had a rat and squirrel problem. We put out some of the rat bait bars. No more rats, and some how the squirrels disappeared also.
Mark

squirrels are pretty much rats too!