Eastern Ontario 2017

[Clinkis]

I boiled through 69L on my propane burners. It's the 3rd best run of this season. I've shut it down for the night and expect to see lots more sap by morning. Sounds like you had a fantastic day too Clinkis.

Yes, unfortunately no time to boil today so will be having a long day tomorrow. Calling for -1 here tonight so hopefully another modest run tomorrow. Glad to here your perciverance is paying off Karen and everyone else who getting good runs today.

[BrutemanAl]

Al, how much syrup did you make this year?

I collected 465.5 L, and ended up with only 10.5 L finished. Went for a drive on the atv yesterday to the forest to double check I didn't forget anything, and every single hole was pouring sap out, part of me wanted to go back and get some stuff, but it was already 3 pm and by the time I went back and put stuff back in, it wouldn't have been worth it. I even yelled at 1 tree, I tap it every year, get nothing from it, every year I say i am not going to tap it, yet I still do in hopes of it producing something for me, yesterday the **** thing was running so hard there was a puddle on the forest floor where it was gathering lol.

[Big_Eddy]

We quit last weekend. Boiled the last of the sap Sunday, drained the flue pan and boiled the rest in the syrup pan. Last batch of syrup was pretty dark and a bit caramalized. Baking syrup. Pulled the pans and washed them all. Buckets were left hanging until Saturday which was the first avail day to wash them. Got up Saturday morning to ice on the pond so quickly dumped all the goo in the buckets and left them up. We collected another 100gals this morning before we pulled the taps. I'm down to the last 25 gals now, all the buckets are washed, and the syrup coming off is very light and delicate. I guess washing the pans well was a good thing although I'm going to have to do it all over again now.

[Galena]

Still getting good clear sap here, got 59l over last 48 hrs. BF just finished final heat shield work on tiny sugar shack, still have to burn a good fire in cast iron stove out there to get out any paint stink before I trust it to boil sap. Ah well electric stove and cast iron indoor woodstove used to carrying the load. If this, batch #5 is my last, will be happy cause hardly any nitre and at about 127l (so far) should make a true gallon+ syrup. If trees keep going and give me a batch #6 will be ecstatic as I love the late stuff :-)

[Clamer33]

Walked in this morning with two full tanks to my surprise. One with single passed RO and over flowing for bit by the looks of the floor, the other 95% of fresh sap from the morning. No way the RO could keep up today so we pulled the plug this evening. What a shame to end the season on the largest flow of the year! We pulled up 2.25 GPT in just 20 hrs. God knows what would have been if I had the storage. Either way only have enough wood to burn the balance off tomorrow and do a clean up. Looks like we are going to end around 1.25-1.5 LPT for a total syrup count. Im out of kegs, bottles and using buckets.

On a bad note wow really hard to boil off, really heavy niter. The colour lightened up so much in the flue pan I thought I was just boiling water. Instead of draws coming every 5-10 minutes, it was like every 30 and large draws at a time.. Not something we have had to deal with. However we have run out of cedar slats that we use, and have had to dig into the 4 cords of well seasoned hard wood. That I'm sure is giving us all the trouble. The sap dropped to 1.5% the RO is really slow, sap is warm 54 deg, clear coming in, but cloudy and a little smelly after running thru the RO. Stopped to rinse the RO several times. Didn't help much. Sure it's the end too many issues.... Oddly the syrup has a really buttery flavour 4 of us tasted it and all said it tasted different but good..

On a side note, and good reason for a pump. Last Friday march 31 we were at 9300 gallons for the season. AS of today when we pulled the plug 16993 gallons. Pumps ran all week, day and night except this past friday night. If you need a reason to buy a pump I can assure you it saved a lot of guys seasons this year. Everyone on buckets around me have not boiled much at all this year.

[Clinkis]

What a great weekend. Collected around 550 gallons of sap from yesterday and today. Got through 400 gallons today. Will get that last 150 gallons processed tomorrow afternoon when I get home from work. Syrup was excellent quality. When I went back this evening to shut down the vacuum pump for the last time the peepers were going wild marking the end to a great season for me. Will post my totals later this week.

I 2nd the advantage of a vacuum pump. My next door neighbour collect 60 gallons from gravity pipeline on 200 taps in the same period of time I collected 550 gallons from 265 taps.

[Run Forest Run!]

Glad to hear that you Eastern Ontarians had a great weekend. I did my final boil today. Because of the blizzard on Thursday I was able to collect 90L over the weekend. It made 2L of light, but deeply flavoured, syrup. The sugars and some of the box elders are still dripping, but I've called it a season. With temps heading into the 20s this week, it's just too warm.

My numbers are less than half that of last year. I'm so happy that I grabbed the drill in February and rolled the dice. Looks like it was the right call for me.

[maple75]

Best collection of the season was today. 70 gallons from 80 taps. So far this year I have 14 liters finished. Sure is a slow year compared to 2016. Still lots of snow so I'm hopeful that we get a couple more good runs.

[ennismaple]

Surprisingly, the sap ran well on Friday even though it was barely above freezing. With 3500 gallons in front of us the RO went on early Saturday morning. And then... our good friend Murphy showed up and we blew a tractor tire on the 2nd load of the day! Several hours later we'd borrowed a smaller tractor from my uncle and we were back running on partial loads. One hill was so muddy from Thursday's rain that we had to set up a temporary pump line to the top of the hill or we wouldn't be able gather that sap. This went so well that a permanent pump line will be installed for that tank next year!

We pushed through just over 5000 gallons on Saturday and then shut down while I continued to gather until midnight to get the RO feed tank filled for the morning. Yesterday the sap ran some but was really slowing down as the temperature climbed. Total sap for the say was just over 4000 gallons.

Both days the first runs of syrup coming off were well into dark-robust (verging on very dark) and lightened to about the line between amber-rich and dark. Flavour was excellent with no off taste.

We left the pumps on overnight hoping to get one more boil today. There wasn't enough sap to fire up this morning but hopefully we can get one more boil tonight or tomorrow morning to finish off the season.

Yesterday I managed to get our H2O Innovations Smartrek monitoring system set up - better late than never! For now, we bought the tablet and gateway for the camp plus 2 vacuum sensors as a trial. Installation was quite easy and once I figured out (with help from John from H2O) where I messed up on setup of the gateway I was getting vacuum readings in the camp. I found a couple leaks in one section of woods and the 2" Hg increase was noticeable several thousand feet away on the graphs that each sensor keeps on the tablet. We will definitely be adding more nodes for next year.

[Galena]

Fairly good sap run this weekend but sure sucked balls today, more moths and flies than sap in 60% of the pails....ugh! Still got a couple gallons. Buds on sugars still shut but heard peepers this evening. So a little p.o.'d but ah well what can you do. At least sugar shack works well, so homemade it's hilarious. Will try to remember to get and post pics tomorrow, dead in the water at present. Night night.

ETA: Walked the trees this am and basically no sap, just drowned moths, poor stupid things. And one spile, the east spile on #1, looked like it had just gone and dumped straight nitre into the pail! I was going to try and leave spiles up til weekend but may pull tonight and just make one huge batch of #5 and call it a year. What a season.