Tapped last week of January- Jefferson Co

Been kind of slow logging in and posting, but we did get things started and tapped on January 25-26. Had several good runs last week, and a couple of good boils to sweeten the pans. about one more good run and i'll be ready to draw some off and finish. of course this weekend is our first real snow (Feb 7/8) and everything is frozen up right now. Been really busy trying to catch up after not tapping a single tree last year. We completely moved our 12 x 20 sugarhouse from in front of our house, poured a cement footer and took it completely down, and rebuilt it 150 ft behind the cabin and closer to the bottom of our sugarbush hill. Lot of work there. our wood floor was rotting away, so inside the cement footer ring where the walls sit, we gravelled the whole inside and put in rubber barn floor mats. kind of nice if any water gets on the floor just sweep it and it drains away. I did pour some bases for the legs of the cooker. along with the roof , i had an 8 x 2 ft cupola hole, and figured out a way to run "legs" up to the cupola roof piece, through some cut pieces of 4" PVC pipe, and ran a brace across the bottom of the legs on both ends. then i ran steel aircraft cable through a series of pulleys over to a winch on the wall, so I can raise my cupola roof when in season, and when done can lower the whole cupola down onto the actual sugarhouse roof so no rain blows in. i was surprised how well it works, and pretty proud of my hillbilly engineering.

along with all of that we tore down about 10,000 ft of old tubing from the top of the hill to the bottom, and ran 500 ft of 3/4 mainline and 2000 ft of 5/16 to 67 new taps, so we downsized a bit. we did get a sap puller though and it seems to work pretty good, though i haven't had it hooked up yet during a good run. going to take about 10 days off at the end of Feb so hoping to have some good runs this month and keep up until then.