Checking what VT sugar makers are doing

[Shirefisher]

I was planning to tap tomorrow or on Town Meeting Day which is the tradition. Well now I'm not sure with a temperature change of 40 degrees to 0 Monday night with 40- 50 mph winds and a -15 to -30 windchill on Tuesday Morning. That is not good.

[VTfarmboy]

picked almost 1gpt in the last 30 hours, was cranking and still running hard, testing right at 2%

[VTfarmboy]

blissville was that you on craigslist with 6 275g totes for sale? i need another one and dont want to drive to far

[blissville maples]

blissville was that you on craigslist with 6 275g totes for sale? i need another one and dont want to drive to far

Unfortunately it wasn't me. I get you there, seems everything on Craigslist is 2+ hrs away! If I see or hear of anything I'll let ya know.

[blissville maples]

Sugar did come up nicely 1.8-2.

Boiled Saturday and Sunday, sweetened pans and made 90 gallons of amber. Things are already idling down from the battle of getting up and running.

Hasn't run as hard as it did for the three hours it ran Friday afternoon with that sun, but certainly running well, probably 1 gpt since yesterday midday.

Nice freeze coming, hopefully that will take it to 2%+.

[drewlamb]

Super underwhelming here in Calais. Less than we hoped for but about what we expected. Cleared 0.3 gpt from yesterday through about noon today. Sugar at 1.5%. Enough to do a gentle boil for a couple hours and sweeten the pans some. Doesn't look like anything coming until early next week. Guess there's no excuse not to be ready.

[PARKER MAPLE]

We had our first boil this afternoon. We had pulled in a little over 1 gpt in last 24hrs. We don’t have every taped as of today but the 2400 gallons was a good start to get things going on. Ro and sweetened, and made around 15-16 gallons of Fancy.
I hope this freeze will bump up the sugar a bit. It tested at 1.5%, that was a bummer but it’s what we got.
Next week looks better. Nothing for a few days unless the weather is wrong again.

[Goatogether]

Hey there....I keep seeing the reference to “sweetening the pans” , which may have been what we did up here in West Charleston today. Pumped out our gathering tank, ran it through just the prefilter in our RO to check for leaks, then into the evaporator to see how that looked. We boiled for awhile to tune the floats, then shut her down (gas evaporator) and left the sap in there. Tomorrow we plan to bring it back up and run the sap through our homemade vacuum filter and see how that does. Is this what y’all are referring to?

[drewlamb]

Sweetening the pans is taking sap from raw sap or ROed sugar content to the higher sugar contents at the various gradients around the evaporator. Today we did our first boil but did not draw off any syrup, so just "sweetened the pans".

[GeneralStark]

Had my first boil today as well. Collected about 1400 gal. in 48 hours since closing the valve on Saturday. Sugar at about 1.4 and made over 10 gal. of amber/golden... literally right at 75 on the hanna checker. I'm impressed withe the syrup quality given not the cleanest sap.

Everything worked and it went pretty smooth overall. Looking as though I'll have some time to finish a few projects in the woods and sugarhouse before the sap runs again....