Eastern Ontario 2019

Hey BackCountry, yep you're in the same boat I was in...lots of great clear sap still coming but also insane amounts more of boiling. How long can your wood, time and energy hold out for is what it really comes down to.

Many people pull spiles when the sap is still running; this season is the first time ever I have done so. I usually leave spiles in til the trees dry up of their own accord. And the runs were starting to slow a little and some spiles were drying up of their own accord. I still would have liked to leave them in but I was running too short of everything.

In terms of how quickly your trees will heal...good question! I have a mature tree on whom you can barely find holes from two seasons ago, and its immediate neighbour, also mature, only 8ft away has holes from 5yrs ago that are taking a painfully long time to close up. My younger bush maples seem pretty good at healing up. Take a look at the trees for the holes you put in last year and go by them.

Hope this helps!

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Originally Posted by Galena

Hey BackCountry, yep you're in the same boat I was in...lots of great clear sap still coming but also insane amounts more of boiling. How long can your wood, time and energy hold out for is what it really comes down to.

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Yup, you got it... I think if I pull up spiles now and collect all my 4L jugs, I'll probably have more than enough sap. I can have a few bonfires over the next couple of nice days to try and reduce a bit quicker, but after this week, firewood will definitely be getting more valuable. Amazing how fast it goes when your always trying to keep a pot boiling. I was wondering how safe it was to take the top firebricks of my stove out in order to get a hotter top plate. But I rekon it's not a great idea... What I really should be doing is running some kind of electric boiler. With no leaves on the trees I have an excess of solar polar right now. And that doesn't require splittin! lol

A compromise! About half of my taps are overflowing right now. Mostly the furthest ones. I'll just collect those jugs and pull the spiles. Bury all the jugs and keep the other half collecting for a few more days, just in case ;)

Another great weekend for us. My brother boiled Wednesday and left almost nothing in the woods. By Friday morning I had all the tanks full to the top! Ohhhh boy... 9000 gallons of sap to get through. Pushed 6000 through Friday, 6200 through Saturday and cleaned everything else up on Sunday. It looks like the sap is clear enough to get 1 more boil tomorrow. The sap in our zero tank went slimy today so we've turned it out onto the ground but the open tanks are still ok. It gets tough to filter the sap coming in and to keep the RO supply pressure high enough at the end but hopefully we can get it processed and filtered.

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Hope everyone had a great season..looking to upgrade a few things next year... if anyone has these items they would be interested in selling drop me an email or text.
Maple butter machine
Maple soft candy machine
Lapierre turbo RO or ??
Water jacket bottler

Billyjbutler@yahoo.com
613-281-0471

Finally have some figures for my season. If I count in the 42l I gave to some clients (who made just under 2l with it) I got 628l sap and 30l syrup.

But if I keep it just to what I collected and processed myself the numbers are 585.6l sap and 28.2l syrup. That's a 21:1 ratio. INSANE.

So glad the season is done! Now to get ready for next year's madness :-)

Take care everyone and enjoy the rest of the year!

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Originally Posted by butler

Hope everyone had a great season..looking to upgrade a few things next year... if anyone has these items they would be interested in selling drop me an email or text.
Maple butter machine
Maple soft candy machine
Lapierre turbo RO or ??
Water jacket bottler

Billyjbutler@yahoo.com
613-281-0471

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We will have a CDL RO for sale. PM me for details.

Cdl 600 might be a little to big for me... I found having to run the hobby 250 through 2 passes to get 6-8 percent very time consuming when there are machines that do it in one pass...

You can't blame us for trying! We ran the pumps from Wednesday evening until Friday morning and I was greeted by 4 almost full tanks - of very ropey sap! Time to open the valves and start cleaning up. With Friday's heavy rain we washed the Beast, cleaned the RO and washed all the tanks at the camp. Saturday and Sunday we pulled and washed lines and yesterday we washed tanks and releasers. All that is left is to put isopropyl alcohol in the mainlines and move drums back to the house.

I pulled my taps last weekend, my final tally was 632 L sap, 19 L syrup from 27 taps for an average ratio of 2.7 Brix overall. Overall I burned about a couple of face cord of Lanark white cedar, which was far less than expected. Based on the volume of wood, BTU for cedar, and volume of sap evaporated, I worked out that my evaporator is only about 15% efficient, so will be looking to trap the heat better through some improvements this summer.

My volume per tap was less than expected but there was a factor of 10 difference between my best producing trees and my lessor ones - all sugar maples. Most of my best producers were at the top of hills, except for a couple that were literally growing in the ditch beside my driveway. They had roots buried under 2 feet of snow throughout the season - but I guess lots of sun because of being near the driveway. So next year will be tapping some different trees as I get to know my bush better.

Well finally finished my last batch of nearup that I had in the freezer (which was actually like batch #3). Like batch #4 turns out I had overcooked it and needed to add some distilled water to get it right. Total syrup this season approx. 22.2L from 725L of sap. Not too shabby at 32.6:1. Think I'll explore making maple sugar and maple candies this year!

Have a great summer everyone!
Paul.

Nice job Paul,
Cut and split a couple of face cords of wood up at the cabin this weekend past for next year's boiling.
Hauled some home and stacked this morning, will haul and stack the rest next trip.......
I keep passing by the evaporator thinking of improvements we should do but never do anything about it LOL.
Hope everyone is enjoy the spring weather......

haha Wisers, I'm also concentrating on getting wood in for next year's boiling! Still on the lookout for a cast iron woodstove that doesn't leak heat like a sieve, in case you stumble across one. Also trying to get into spring mode but keep expecting a foot or two of white stuff to start falling any minute!

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Originally Posted by Galena

haha Wisers, I'm also concentrating on getting wood in for next year's boiling! Still on the lookout for a cast iron woodstove that doesn't leak heat like a sieve, in case you stumble across one. Also trying to get into spring mode but keep expecting a foot or two of white stuff to start falling any minute!

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LOL.. as much as I miss the winter even I don't want that to happen anymore.. my grass seed is sprouting up and turkey hunting is in full swing!

Susan..will you be posting a pic of the bottles from each batch side by side to see the colour changes over the season? Always look forward to seeing those.
Paul.

I did two major boils this year, here is the photo of the syrup from them. Not hard to tell which batch was first!

Attachment 20114

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Originally Posted by paulslund

LOL.. as much as I miss the winter even I don't want that to happen anymore.. my grass seed is sprouting up and turkey hunting is in full swing!

Susan..will you be posting a pic of the bottles from each batch side by side to see the colour changes over the season? Always look forward to seeing those.
Paul.

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Aww gosh shucks durnit...of course I'll post the *class pic* for this year...here ya go, enjoy! NOtice that batch seems to think it's beer and another one will not.clear.up. and so looks like peach jam. Ah well there is always at least one, right? Attachment 20117

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Originally Posted by Galena

Aww gosh shucks durnit...of course I'll post the *class pic* for this year...here ya go, enjoy! NOtice that batch seems to think it's beer and another one will not.clear.up. and so looks like peach jam. Ah well there is always at least one, right? Attachment 20117

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Nice! Dark, then light then dark near the end! Cool!