Eastern Ontario 2019

[TurkeyJohn]

Boiled again last night, 20 gallons down to 3 litres, buckets all full this morning, will have to wait,

Are we all having fun yet?

TurkeyJohn


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[Big_Eddy]

Sounds like the sap is running back home, here I sit in a hotel room in Kohler Wisconsin wishing I was at home boiling the tree pee.

Not to rub it in Al, but it sure did run last night. 160 gals sap from 150 trees. Of course - it was the one night my son was late home from work AND my wife was too. I'd fill my 2 collecting pails every 4-6 trees, so it took me a while on my own. Each ~20 tree loop took multiple trips to the tank and back.

[MikeC82]

Pulled in 110 Gallons/ 400+ Liters off my 110 taps in the last 24 hours and still coming hard out of the swampy trees. Made a dripper w. copper tube to pre-heat somewhat and try to keep from losing the boil when adding to the pan. Gonna test it tomorrow and burn all day to try to catch up...Hard freeze tonight should restart the higher trees. Not sure if I will be able to burn it all.

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[Galena]

Still not done counting how much I got since 4pm yesterday. Just glad I went around with the 5g pails as I needed them! Only got 30l in the tanks and probably another 30l in the pails. Think it's time to break out...The Brute.

[PaulRenaud]

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!

[Fort Wisers]

Emptied the buckets yesterday morning with one of our daughters and got a good amount but this left the buckets empty for the day.
Shortly into the morning the wind came up fierce......
I was away from home all day and upon returning MOST of the buckets were on the ground due to wind.
As luck would have it they all seemed to find the nearest mud hole to be blown into so they came in for a good wash.

There were two buckets that managed to survive the days wind and were almost full so I left them while cleaning the others.
As luck would have it again the wind pulled one bucket AND spile down right out of the tree. So yesterday's collection left a little to be desired.
We left all the buckets off the trees last night and I'll hang them again this morning.

Boil will start again this morning and then that's likely it for us this season!

Al, safe travels!!
TurkeyJohn, to answer your question.....yes, tons of fun LOL
Eddy, that does sound like a heck of a lot of work. We have a very small operation compared to you and even it at times feels like a lot when everyone else is busy!
Gelena, is the Brute your stove in Shack Wacky? Good luck, hope the shack's inaugural firing goes well!
PaulRenaud, Welcome to the forum!


Cheers everyone.....

[MikeC82]

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.

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[Galena]

...Gelena, is the Brute your stove in Shack Wacky? Good luck, hope the shack's inaugural firing goes well!

Hehe Wisers, yep we've all chased after runaway buckets :-) SW has been fired successfully about 4x now, works great! However you won't see billowing clouds of steam or even much smoke if you're driving by. I am burning all dried wood and gawd what a blessing after last year. You see only heat haze. Oh I should say that you may see steam coming off the roof on a rainy day cause it's tin.

Brute is my big 70l garbage bin which has been used for nothing but sap storage. I have only 5 15l water jugs, also used only for sap storage, but in crazy times like when I've had 150l in holding, the Brute comes out.

I see double-digit temps in the near future so wondering if that quick a rise will kill the run?

[ennismaple]

Yesterday was a little hectic to say the least. I got the RO running by 6:30am with 3500 gallons of sap in the sugar camp and another 4000 in the woods. RO ran steady until 5pm. Fired up at 12:30 and last fire on just after 5pm and made more syrup per hour than I've ever made before! Couldn't keep up with the filtering and the only thing that saved me was running out of concentrate. It's nice boiling with concentrate that started as 3.0% sap because it sure comes off the end of the evaporator fast! My brother is boiling today and probably has another 5000 gallons of sap in front of him so it should be another big day.

[TurkeyJohn]

Hey FortWisers,

It's been our best year ever, with the warm weather coming and time getting tight for me, pulled taps and buckets this morning, last boil of the year tonight...It's been a bumper crop for sure, now I'm filling mason jars with syrup, loving it.

PaulRenaud, welcome aboard, best spot for Maple info on the web and loads of local folks to compare specs with....

Hey Galena, it's been a time seeing your posts and how you always stay so chipper with all your challenges, of course, when you overcome them and win
, we're all cheering for you out here too....

Good luck with the rest of the season gang....I need to get better at keeping stats, but rely on the old noggin to know what works....

One thing I do know is next year I'm going to put the barrel on cinder blocks to help with the bending to either stoke the fire or check the thermometer, and the ManoSteel pan worked fabulously...

TurkeyJohn