Quote Originally Posted by PaulRenaud View Post
Hi, I'm new to this site and still learning about maple syrup making. I have a 44x16" rear pan and15x16" finishing pan on the front of my arch. Last year I taped only 4 or 5 trees and used just the finishing pan so this is the first year I'll be using the full rig as I learn how to scale up.

I have a 100 acre woodlot in Darling Township of Lanark County about 20 klicks south of Calabogie and this year I have 30 taps out, 3 of which are not producing. Spring is late in this neck of the woods and I am only recently getting an average of 1 L of sap per day per tap (with my best trees giving me 3L/day), and have harvested over 200 L so far. Good news is that the Brix level is high @ 3%, about 3x what I was expecting.

My goal for this year is to better understand the mechanics of scaling up my operation. Things like average ratio of taps to Litres of sap&syrup, how long it takes to boil X litres on my arch, how much wood, how to manage the inventory of sap, etc. Am very impressed by those of you who track & graph daily production and temperature, hopefully I'll get there next year!
Hi Paul. Very nice country up where you are. My uncle has a deer camp on the north side of the bogie north of ferguson lake and I drive through your area heading up there. Beautiful spot.

They say you are supposed to average 40L of sap per tree - which then converts (on average) to 1 L of syrup - but I've found it really depends on each tree, where they are located (i.e. type of ground, wet areas, how much sun they get, etc.). It also seems to vary year-to-year; some of my best trees last year did ziltch this year. However, you will find a few great trees that just pump it out consistently year-after-year.

Like Galena has told me - you will get to know your bush over time and the trees and which ones are good and which ones you can skip etc.

You've got a nice stove - we only have a converted oil tank with a 4X2 flat pan - so there's bound to be differences in performance. What I did find though in my case was that the wood was interesting. Last year I cut and chopped hardwood and tried it and it was really slow-going. I assumed you would want to burn same type of wood that is good for heating a house. We ended up mostly burning old fence rails from my father-in-law's farm because they were the only thing that put out good flame. This year I cut down only standing, dead cedar. We've got about 70 acres just north of prescott and there's no shortage of it. Really dry. Chopped finer. It seems to keep the flame right on the pan as opposed to glowing coals and that's what keeps a good boil on our pan. Your stove might not perform that way at all - but that's my two cents on wood.

I've attached my water-to-sugar graphs and syrup ratios from last year's boils. They are from 65 taps of mostly red maples. This year we did 110 and I am interested to see what the final results are. As you can see, in our case, the sugar content seems to really fluctuate over the course of the year. This year the sugar seems to be really high though - at least for our first couple boils.

FINISHEDSYRUP.JPGRATIO.JPG