Checking what VT sugar makers are doing

[steve J]

My sap registered 2.7 yesterday and I am 60 percent red maple. But was slow going . I got 16 gallons on 16 taps are my shurflo experiment. 13 gallons on 26 buckets. And 15 gallons on 75 3/16 taps. Less than half my trees are running.

[blissville maples]

We're getting 2.3-2.5 here as well Keep in mind that you have two brand new membranes and the sap is sweet (they are not having to work as hard)also the temperature was almost ideal for max RO production I Have a CDL six post machine and it was doing 3000 an hr. going to 14% on friday (pretty Awesome!)

I'm thinking that deffinantly helps, but still impressive as at one point it was almost 1200 gallons an hour on a 1000 gallon an hour machine!!. Our old machine was a springtech six hundred, we replace the membranes and lucky to do 350-400 gallons an hour. I also noticed the nighter and minerals seem to be low maybe that helps out the new membrane also.

It did run a little bit today in the sunshine I was surprised nothing special but at over 2% it's well worth it. Looking forward to this coming week will be a real nice recharge for the trees!!!

[bj's sugaring]

Well, our sap was only 1.5 or so, and over the couple day run we got 1.4gpt, 275 gallons total. Kinda disappointing but im telling myself things are just waking up. My buckets ran the first half a day and were dry the rest of the time, 3/16 did well, but not what I hoped. We were at 25-29" on all of our lines.

We removed 200 gallons of water with our new lapierre junior in just over 2 hours, and boiled the remaining 9% into almost 6 gallons of amber rich in under 3 hours. Some of it even approached delicate! A nice surprise on our natural draft 2x6.

We then spent an embarrasing amount of time filtering and bottling, and ended up with a little over 5 gal jugged up. Need to reclaim everything thats in our flat filters...trying to figure out the best way to do that. We definitely need to refine this process as it sucked in a bad way. Maybe its time to set up a vacuum filter.

Overall I was happy with most of our process, we changed literally everything this year and spent a lot of time and thought getting it set up. Oh and money 

[VTfarmboy]

ran strong but not till late in the day as cold as it was, .15gpt testing 2.5%, trees seem ready to go now this week should be good

[blissville maples]

Bjs- funny I know what ya mean, whatever works at times!! New system always new kinks to work out.

Well got nearly half a gallon of sap per tap today, hard to believe i didn't think would run that well, looking forward to this week.

[MJPJ Sugars]

Sitting at just under 6% of the sap collected same day as last year.

Change "Beef" to "Sap"
wendys-wheres-the-beef.jpg

I guess it makes sense that if we could be in the goldilocks zone last year (twice the average year), we could be at the opposite end of the pendulum another year.

[VTfarmboy]

.33 gpt today testing 2%

[VTfarmboy]

.5gpt still testing 2%, still plenty of ice in the woods, woods road still rock hard, tomorrow should be big.

[DrTimPerkins]

Took a while for the trees to thaw again after the deep cold we had, but starting to come in fairly well this afternoon. Vacuum level in the research area and in the main bush from the webcam in the releaser room in the photo. Max we can do at our elevation is 28.6" Hg.

Hoping to find a bunch of full tanks come morning. Sap running about 2.5 Brix.

Vacuum at releaser.jpg

[spud]

Sap started rolling about 3:00 pm here. Consistently 400 GPH now. Lots of foam and testing 2.3%.

Spud