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I've cleaned all my barrels, buckets, filters, pans, and everything is stored, EXCEPT for my spouts. They're still in and after Thursday it looks like a 2-4 night period of below freezing. As of today, I think the sugar maple buds are still tight but the reds are getting colorful.
I'm going to hold out in hopes for a 1/2 gallon (+/-) more of finished and put my buckets back out. What the heck? It's only once a year, right? :rolleyes:
I'm with you valleyman, Tomorrow night maybe, but Thu, Fri, Sat & maybe Sun for frost now shown on NOAA. :)
yeah Mike thats what I saw. It looks to go well below freezing according to them. If I can get 2 or 3 days I'm thinking one last batch. I'm sure the sugar count will be low but I have a feeling it'll be a good run.:D
28 this morning, I'll know in a few hours if the wait was for naught ~
Same for me over in Stafford. Temps the next few nights look good and I think I'm going spend a few hours tomorrow morning redrilling some of my taps to see what I can get. It's been such a poor production year I'll take what I can get. I chased the sweet out of my pan last week and got an additional 5 gallons making my seasonal total 15 gallons if you can believe that. I should have made that every week!
I saved 5 gallons of sweet that I can use to resweeten my pans and I'm hoping I can get a few hundred gallons this weekend. I can use every drop I get! Everything is still setup, so why not? In a good year we'd all be still boiling now so I don't know why so many people are giving up.
Dave
Well, everything I had running just 6 days ago is done - :cry: A week ago, I tapped 6 trees that were a long walk, those are running but thats it. There was 4 more there, I tapped those this morning. I'll see how much I can get out of 10 taps in the next week. What a crummy year.
I went to one of my sugar bushes close to where I work to ream the tap holes and I was quite surprised to see the taps were moist. They weren't running a whole bunch, but they were doing something. I figure that it was only 29 or so this morning after having been above 32 for a while. I'm hopeful that tomorrow night's 15 will freeze them pretty good and give me one more run. Tomorrow I'm reaming the rest of my sugar maples. Heck, a day in the woods with my maples is better than a day at work, right?
I don't have any buds on my sugar maples....just the reds. I can always sell the syrup as commercial. :rolleyes:
Dave
Most of the taps I pulled started to run right after. There's a small part of the hole where the tap seals against the tree that never gets air. Putting the tap back in, seals it back up. They won't drip much or for long from this small area.
It dropped to 20 degrees here last night. The ground was frozen hard as a rock. I turned my vacuum on let it run all day. 21" at the start of the day until the lines thawed. Vacuum dropped to 12" by 5pm, probably sucking nothing but gas. Collected maybe 5 gallons of what looked like milk off of 340 taps.
My season is over!
I still want to see what will happen on Monday & Tuesday after thawing out a bit. The high was only 40 here and and tonight's low will be in the teens again. That's a pretty cold stretch after having been so warm.
My understanding is that red maples stop producing sap after a while but sugar maples will still produce. I have about 150 of those that don't have any buds on them and I want to see what they will do.
Heck, the season may be over but we'll see. If I have something, great, if not, it's clean up time.
Dave