North East Ohio 2019

[woodburner]

Results of first run. Sap started at 2deg and went to 2.25 half way. Made 18.5 gal. All hard maples. Good start.

[forager]

Results of first run. Sap started at 2deg and went to 2.25 half way. Made 18.5 gal. All hard maples. Good start.

Great to hear, thanks for the update.

Test boiling some water tomorrow on the new evaporator - Looking to tap our 150 on vac Sunday, looks like we'll likely have potential light runs Mon-Tues-Thurs-Fri next week then hopefully we continue the warmup into the week of the 18th. I considered waiting til next weekend, but eh - my patience has run out and these reports sound positive. Spoke to the folks at Gingerich yesterday and they have about 4300 of their 6000 tapped at this point and producing well (middlefield).

[johnallin]

Results of first run. Sap started at 2deg and went to 2.25 half way. Made 18.5 gal. All hard maples. Good start.

Curious if that is higher or lower sugar than normal.

[buckeye gold]

I am way south of you guys, but my sugar content is up .3 percent from last year. That is still only 1.5. I never get high sugar content, if I got over 2% I'd be beside myself.

[woodburner]

We had 2deg at best last year. We have had some very sweet runs over the years , our best was a run after a cold spell that ran better than 30 to 1 for the whole day. Never had it that good again. We thought we were in heaven, we were getting a batch off every fire up. We usually start better than 2 and end a little below. It is a bad year when we start below 2.

[johnallin]

By the looks of your sugar content, and your history, this should be a better year than last.

I spent today poking away at setting up the new releaser...made and installed a bracket mount for it on the outside wall of the sugar house.

Tomorrow I hope to get the moisture trap put up and get it all plumbed into the vac line I installed last weekend.

[jetdoc]

Never fails. First day I want to tap and we get a fresh blanket of snow.😁 We will be going out in about an hour and start tapping about 300 trees today. Vacuum is all hooked up and ready to go. Pump out lines are all ready to go and I'm hoping the sugar house is already to go. Thanks to H&M we have a another new addition to the sugar house. It's a 15 gallon water jacket bottler. Can't wait to use it. Also this will be our very first year to boil our own syrup on our new Smoky Lake 2x8 evaporator.

[miboss]

Got the majority of 530 tapped yesterday and finished up this morning. Lines and trees still froze, but vacuum is hooked up and on, so maybe we'll see some run tonight.

[johnallin]

My new tank is ready to be picked up and almost finished with plumbing up the vac system.

I hope to be ready to tap by the first of next week.

Did any of you, who are tapped, see any significant sap this week?

[heus]

I will be tapping probably this weekend in Ashtabula County. Looking at accuweather after seeing Chris' post on the NW Pa thread, I don't see a whole lot of good sap weather until mid March. A day or two here and there but that's it. Of course, extended forecasts are usually wrong anyways.