Hop Kiln Road 2019

[cropseyvillemark]

It's great to have you back in the game.

[Hop Kiln Road]

A...B...C...Do I have some breaking news out of K-Bec but I gotta get it translated and organized first. Meanwhile 615 of 700 tapped with one more steep orchard to go before the serious sugar snows start. Doing a real good clean job of it too. Was a little daunted when I started rolling and thought I might have to look into this new fangled 4 handed Tokyo tapping that's all the rage with the big guys. Not sure how it works, but it sure sounds wicked fast. Even asked M about it, she's on that social media stuff a lot, but she just gave me that look so I'll just have to check into it later. Anyway since the weather held off and I can see the last tank just 85 skinny 3/16 taps down the hill when I let the hens into the spa in the mornings, I think I've got it made! Golden. Home Free. Course now Red Roof has got me thinking maybe I oughta test my RO.

[Russell Lampron]

Testing that RO is a good idea. I got the parts to turn mine into double the squeezer that it used to be today and I can't wait to try it out.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Gosh just can't keep up with Red Roof and his alchemy business. Guess he has added a 2nd tower to his castle, like, overnight. Okay. Finished tapping and Sir K and I extended the wire behind the stables out to the road and will pull the pipe today. 1300' total. Low pitch but better than pumping uphill. Here's a 5/16 check valve on the left and a .225 thin wall on the right. And a .225 closure on a 12" tree after 9 months on the left and after 21 months lower and to the right. Hard to see. But the tree has been thinned and fertilized and growing more than an inch in 3 years.

225 Thinwall.jpg2016 & 15 Closure.jpg

[Hop Kiln Road]

One of my bucket correspondents just reported You Know Who dumped off a huge email hack from Those Guys 2.0, apparently from a federation's server. Talk about boundaries and walls out the windows. Let me try a quick synopsis. Chinese are closing their C Ag wallets cause of their 5G lady being held in a Vancouver palace. Alberta is slowing oil production cause of plugged pipes. (WCS $35US/bbl; WTI $56US/bbl) The AG ratted out the Premier. C National GNP just fell off the dogsled. Total C Household Debt arrived at the space station. (C 170% of Disposable Income; US 75% of Disposable Income) And that funny bird that can't walk will spend more time underwater than floating. So there has been a secret, massive build up of legit and illegit maple production. Good news for American importers.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Everything is frozen tight. Been wondering why folks to Maine are making sooo much maple these days? Well this dude up to Rangley way back in the 1950s built a bunch of big guns and shot orgone all over the place till the USDA food police stopped him. Yup, USDAFP, who'd ever guess, there's a scary picture of one the Maple News, got their own special uniform, handcuffs and everything. Anyway they hauled him right off to prison, blew up his guns and even burned all his books as soon as they figured out the orgone had crossed state lines. Pretty powerful stuff that orgone cause now folks to Maine got maple syrup coming out their ears. No wonder the USDAFP wants to nose around the all sugarhouses...with fancy orgone leak detectors. Gotta stop the stuff before lemons start growing in D.C.

[bprifle01]

Too late. DC is already full of lemons!

[Hop Kiln Road]

Very happy with the overall bark quality while tapping this year. Some orchards have been thinned and fertilized for 12 years now with notable results. Even the most damaged orchard, severely over and cluster tapped, is now starting to respond and I can't wait to see if the yield climbs. BTW, application and 8 oz of 10-10-10 cost about $.16 per tree and can be done while rinsing lines. The soils here were completely depleted by 200+ years of one poor practice after another. The irony is global champion American agricultural practice involves breeding superiority; cows, chickens, pigs, corn, soybeans, wheat, everything but the New England forests where for hundreds of years, think breeding cycles, we harvested or destroyed (road salt) the best stock and left the worse to seed. Like the Brits trying to preserve the empire.

[Hop Kiln Road]

Decided since nothing is happening on the steam front till mid next week, thought it might be a dandy good time to do our taxes. It usually it ends up a tussle through the summer with an exchange of polite letters with patient ladies in Wheeling or Kansas City or Cincinnati. Not sure why these gals have to move every year and change phones and post offices. Well Traders, I can't believe what they're done and a little confused what they hope to accomplish. Perhaps it was just too many cooks? And I'm not going to bore you going down the list, but, the only person who will being filing a mere postcard is simple business Stormy, if she got a 1099 from whomever, which she should have but nobody in Congress has raised the point; me, I am using exactly as many pages as last year. But my modest taxes went down so I don't see how the Gerald R. Ford's elevators are ever going to go up.

[Hop Kiln Road]

The new 1% mainline wire snapped. Course, thought I had finally gotten it perfectly adjusted. Broke right at a double side tie 7' up a red maple. Only wet area in the 1250' so I'm thinking the wind might be rocking the tree? And, cause the sap hasn't run I was still tweaking the side ties so I lost a lot of the elevations. Didn't have the parts and tools. Tired, so parking at the stables was the quickest access. Pretty sure we met Thirsty's mom. Introduced herself as Lady Running Deer or Dear or Deere. Who knows. Never seen so much silver and turquoise. And her attire looked as if it had snapped a side tie but her mega tractor has an enclosed cab. Still, I am a little concerned about Sir K's vows.