November Journal

[minehart gap]

Finished with my soffit and fascia this morning. Received my Auber Instrument auto draw-off panel the other day and am ordering the valve this week. I decided to turn my cupola doors around and open them out so I can screen the inside instead of the outside. Next is countertops and 100 other little things.

[buckeye gold]

yup that locust is going to rock that half pint

[Sugarmaker]

Folks,
Looking forward to LEME. Hope to see some of you there too.
I haven't done much maple related lately except jug up the last of the syrup from this past spring. Will make some value added maple products from some dark syrup and get ready for one more sales event in mid December.
Have considered stopping this yearly maple madness. Only been making syrup for about 60 years.
Still working on restoring old iron.
Regards,
Chris

[Sunday Rock Maple]

Been working in the woods cutting branches off lines. I also rewire tied some of my older saddles. I also rewire tied all mainlines where it was needed. New pump and releaser room is looking good and I am almost done with that. I will make one more pass through the woods in December and then plan to tap the 3rd and 4th week of January.

Spud

What did you decide on for the new pump?

[spud]

What did you decide on for the new pump?

I bought a Air Tech Liquid ring pump.

Spud

[buckeye gold]

I have a ton of work in my woods. I have 4 runs broken from trees falling and will have to reroute 1 line. I lost 4 sugar maples and one red. All them are firewood now. I will still cut wood, but I have two years worth cut, split and stacked. A local producer has quit due to health and is wanting to sell his equipment, so I'm going to see if he has anything I want. He has a used evaporator if anyone is looking for one. I'm not sure of the size, it may be a 3x8. I know it is leader drop flue and probably 15 years old. It has not been used for 3 years at least. I think I'm going to make a supply run in a couple weeks as I need tubing and fittings, so I'll buy everything I need for the season. It is about to get busy as I want to be ready to tap by Christmas or new years.

[Chicopee Sap Shack]

Pulled a stupid when cutting a blow down off a new 1 in pipe with the chain saw. In a hurry I was cutting over the wire and pipe when it sprang up and cut both. So needless to say I had to splice new pipe and run new wire yesterday. I got it all tied and finished tying about 1500 feet of new wet line. Tomorrow I am going to finish plumbing the RO in the new RO room in the rain and maybe change drops in the afternoon.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Parker]

Amazing how fast that old pine dries out....i should be able to finish filling the shed this week when it warms up a bit...we have 10 inches of snow and it 0 out...going to walk some lines today...
Good luck everyone

[maple flats]

We were at 2 F at 7:00, up to 5 F now. Forecast to be 20F by noon and 29 F for a high. That's better than yesterday when 18 F was our high. Today I'll split more wood ahead.
Sales are going great, both locally and off my website.

[ennismaple]

This early start to the winter has really messed with my plans to get work done in the bush!

Saturday we got about 400ft of the 1200 foot vacuum line installed that we need to run from the new vacuum pump to the releaser. Sunday I stretched 6200 feet of lateral line tubing to replace some 10-year old tubing we ripped out during the summer. Had we not run out of pre-made droplines it would have been over 400 taps. I definitely lay out my mainlines much differently now because we needed to cut in a lot of new manifolds to hook the lines up to the mainline. It will be nice to get that finished this weekend.

The To Do list is getting smaller and smaller! It would be nice to spend a few weekends in the woods doing some thinning rather than panicking right up to tapping time to get things cleaned up.