Eastern Ontario 2019

[paulslund]

Still very slow and short sap runs. GOt 26l over last two days and don't expect much if any today. Batch #2 will make about 1l or slightly over, and Bacth #3 is doen at a hair over 1.5l.

Wow.. I emptied all my buckets Friday night (170 L, which is up from my counts of 120 on Wednesday (didn't empty them)..so not bad for 2 days) and had a look at them all this morning.. I"m lucky if I have 5 L in total from all 30 taps!

[Galena]

Stupid snow has slowed the run. Most trees barely have any drips. But tree #9, always a late runner, is happily providing me with some tree pee :-) Have three batches of syrup finished, Brixed out, ready to bottle. Some golden light and light amber, pics once I get some of each in uniform jars for fair colour comparison. Batch #4 evaping down on house woodstove, Batch #5 out there working down in Shack Whacky.

ETA: decided to blend batches 4 and 5 and toss in the 7l I got today. May as well finish off March with at least one big batch. Should be close to an Imperial gallon.

[Backcountry]

Wow, always a new surprise. I thought with all the snow and ice the trees would be sleepy today, but for the first time all the taps were running at the same time. Managed to collect 23L today which is the best haul yet...

[Galena]

Fun, isn't it, Backcountry? This weather is so whack that I'm not paying attention to any rules, cause they have all flown out the window. I collected sap at -3 last night from trees still dripping, my ratio is WAYY better than 40:1 or even my usual 33-37:1, the little trees will run great and the big ones not at all and vice versa...no consistency at all this season except for outrageous sugar content.

[paulslund]

I checked the buckets around 3 in the afternoon yesterday.. I'm lucky if I have 5L across all 30 buckets! I had high hopes for the weekend as I've seen it where a low pressure system bringing snow and +2 made the trees run like crazy.. but I don't think we even got much past +1 this weekend so perhaps that had an impact.. or maybe the trees are still a little too frozen for them to be affected by that weather?

Hoping for a good week this week as other than tomorrow night, below freezing every night.. but long range forecast for my area shows that could be it (if it holds true.. this weather seems to change even more erratically than it did during the winter!).

So far I've got about 40% of last year's sap haul but with 50% more buckets.. I should have heeded my daughter's advice and double them this year! LOL.. hindsight is 20/20 though!

Have a great day everyone!

[ennismaple]

The weekend was underwhelming for us. Less than 0.75 gallons per tap in total from Friday to Sunday. We pushed it through yesterday to get it cleaned up. Hoping the end of this week and the weekend it will finally open up and give us a big run. We need 2 big weeks to get to a good season!

[DrewCP]

What a Saturday...
Dad had run through about 225L on Friday leaving me with about 725L to deal wit on Saturday. Yikes.

Had a good boil going before 6AM. Ran hard all day and at about 10:30PM we were down to a small enough amount of very close to syrup concentrate. Shut it down for the night. To close to mess it up now. No way I could stay awake another couple hours to finish, filter and bottle after being up at 3 whatever AM.
Fired up on Sunday and finished it off. We ended up with a touch over 30L.

We run a CDL 18"x48" flat pan on a hobby CDL arch. Math says I ran between 40 and 45 liters per hour on Saturday. How did we achieve 40-45 l/h of evaporation on 6 square feet of surface? Well really, we didn't... We pitched all the ice.

I ran a bunch of tests to see what the best way was to manage the large amount of ice in our storage containers. Both chunks from buckets and the stuff that froze down the sides. I came to the sweet spot of draining the ice for 10 minutes then pitching it. Once the ice chunks drained for 10 minutes the ice remaining contained sugar content between .4 and .6% sugar. The concentrate left over was 4.5-5% sugar. This essentially doubled our production. Concentrated our sap and reduced the volume to run. Typically running 400L in a day is a big task for us.

In the end I really have no idea how many L of sap we boiled. What I do know is that boiling sap at 4.5-5% and throwing out volume with very low sugar content is way better than running all of the volume at a fluid 2-2.5% sugar. I encourage everyone to buy a sap hydrometer and play around! So much fun! Poor persons RO at it's finest.



Drew.

[Syrup By The Sea]

Thanks again MikeC82. You were right. After 2 days of above zero temps,the sap continued flowing and I ended up getting over 200L from my 50 taps. They were still running when I went to check them on the weekend, but pretty slowly after the 3rd day in the pluses. Not a bad haul for the area that I'm in. I think the sap is only averaging 1.5-2% though, as I only ended up with a gallon of finished after my boil. LOTS of boiling.

Hoping to get one more in before my reds start to bud out.

I'll try to stay away from the 8 inchers next year BIG_EDDY. They are everywhere, but I'll need to be more patient and let them grow...

[Galena]

Syrup by the Sea, if you're tapping soft maples - reds, silvers, Norways, Freemans - you are going to have a low sugar content compared to sugars and will have to collect much more sap. Fact of life.

And truthfully you MUST stay away from the 8-inchers, no matter how many there are, unless you don't mind the risk of causing severe damage and ending up with a stand of 8-inch standing dead trees.

[Backcountry]

Sap slowed some today, but still managed to grab about a dozen litres to bury in the snow for another day. Starting to see some sweet results. The jar on the right is from last night/todays boil and came out significantly darker than previous boils. The only difference that I can think of is this was Sunday's sap after the storm. Strange...

syrups.jpg