Re-Starting a Family Tradition

[Ty Pilarczyk]

Hi everyone! First post, but I have been stalki--uh--studying this forum for a while.

My brother and I are starting into sugaring next season. It was once a family tradition but has been idle now for many decades. My great grandpa was the last to make it.

Our ultimate goal is to bring his woods back to its former glory. I live on his farm now, and am the seventh generation to do so. To start, we are running about 40 or 50 taps at our dad's place across town. I will post the start of our operation in another thread.

But I wanted to share a photo of my great grandpa in front of his sugarhouse, with his team of horses. The little girl on the sled, to the far left, is my great aunt. She still owns the farm, lives next door, and just turned 95.

Looking forward to getting to know you guys.

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[dogpatch]

Love those old pictures. What a great way to honor your ancestors by starting a sugarbush back up. Best of luck and ask all the questions you have. Welcome to the forum. Marc

[Paddymountain]

Welcome to Mapletrader! And what a beautifal picture! My cousin just gave me a picture of our grandmother and great grandfather
who lost his arm in the Civil War. They are standing in a big field of rasberries. It was probably taken in 1915. I told her, "I will find
out where it was taken" Great to be able to resurrect an old sugar bush with such history.

[Potters3]

Welcome aboard, ask away, best of luck. have fun. And I love the picture, I have one hanging in my sugarhouse of my grandfather , father, 2 uncles with the team dumping sap.

[maple flats]

You have it in your blood, nice picture. Welcome aboard!

[Chicopee Sap Shack]

Thats a picture to get a copy of and post in the sugar house for sure. I love the old horse drawn sledge and tank pictures


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[RC Maple]

Thats a picture to get a copy of and post in the sugar house for sure. I love the old horse drawn sledge and tank pictures

I was reading some previous posts on this subject and came across this one. I know both mom and dad talked about their parents sugaring when they were little, but it wasn't something that continued through their growing up years. On my mom's side, she said they would have a sugar camp in the woods but it was just a temporary structure. I remember my grandpa pointing out where it was when I was little, but there wasn't much to see. Dad's parents made syrup too - but he was pretty young. I think they just boiled it down somewhere back in the woods. It would be great if there were any pictures or more history relating to those sugaring operations. The picture above is a neat bit of family history to look back to in a process that is often passed down from one generation to the next. I guess in my case it just skipped a generation.

[maple flats]

Back in the days when your grandpa was sugaring it was harder for sure. No tubing, no pipelines no vacuum, all they had was hard work and loads of fun.
My only experience using traditional buckets likely like what your grandpa would have has was in my 3rd season making maple syrup. In season 1 I had up to 79 taps, all around where my eventual sugarhouse was to be built later that same year. I tapped in a medium sized cluster of sugar maples about 300' north of where I built my sugarhousew and I used 5 gal cooking oil jugs I got free from a Chinese Restaurant. The residue in the jugs was not fluid, and I had to clean them out. It took lots of manual labor , plenty of Dawn dish soap followed by 5-6x rinsing and shaking the jugs hard with very hot water to make sure the jugs were clean. Fortunately I started about 3 months ahead and was ready as the weather was right. I used those jugs, to collect the sap flow from 2 or 3 taps using 5/16 health spouts and a length of 5/16 tubing. I had made a hole in each cap for the 5/16 to run into the jugs. I soon discovered that wind would blow many of the jugs, tip them over and drain much of the sap. I then started using a spring hose clamp on the tubing just inside the cap. That helped a lot but created another issue. Draining the sap when collecting. I was using a 20HP 4x4 tractor with chains on the rears and on the 3pt hitch I had a utility carrier. I made a wooden box to ride on the arms of the carrier. It was large enough to carry 10 of those jugs, full of sap. I had extra jugs so as I collected if a jug was about half or less full, I unscrewed the cap and poured it into one of the 10 empties I carried in the wooden carrier. For that, after just 1 day, I made a purpose designed funnel. It was 3" PVC pipe on top about 8" long, and in one side I cut out a slot the size to fit the threads on the jugs. That was glued into a reducer 3" to 1.5", then I had about 4" of 1.5" PVC out the bottom which fit well into the neck of the jugs. That made pouring the sap simple. For jugs that were fuller, I unscrewed the cap and just swapped jugs. it worked well. I was able most of the time to only have 1 partial jugs on the carrier by deciding when to pour and when to swap a jug.
In year 2 I put up some 3/4" tubing, still on vacuum. I think that year I got up to about 125 taps with about 15 taps using the old jugs at my parents place and a small grove of sugarmaples I owned across the road from my parents.
Then in yr 3 I got 2 leases, both were partial bucketsw partial tubing. On both trees in their yards were on buckets and those off the lawn were on tubing. That year a one lease I had 50 buckets and 49 taps on roadside tubing along a cornfield. The other lease had 6 buckets on lawn trees and 29 taps on tubing off the lawn in a gulley. That year I also expanded my own woods but doing it without vacuum I had 7 collection tanks I had to collect from. Each was accessable along logging roads. I had tanks with 85 taps, and ranging down to one on just 7 taps. All except 1 line was on sugar maples, that one line was about 3/4 reds, 1/4 sugars. I then had 325 taps.
From then on I got my first larger lease, and I put in vacuum. the first year I only got 125 taps, all on 3/4" tubing but in the following years I added more so the lease got up to 650 taps, all on sugars and all on vacuum running to a vacuum tank. Because the tank was only rated for 20" vacuum I used reducers to keep it at 19".
More to follow!

[maple flats]

More of my story.
As I was collecting the sap one day, pumping it from my vacuum tank a good friend stopped and talked quite a while. Near the end He sort of beat around the topic but I finally learned he had a woods about 2-3 miles past the woods I was collecting sap from. He finally asked if I'd like to tap it. At this point in the season I was far too busy to even look at it, but I told him I'd stop during the summer to look.
It turned out that property presented some challenges but it was certainly worth it. We walked the property, learned the property lines and I began figuring how I'd be able to do it. At this point in time I had recently bought a 3x8 raised flue evaporator that had only 1 season on it, before the owner got injured big time. In the end he had to have a morphine pump implanted for a major back injury. He was out of the maple business. The 3x8 was made by Leader and purchased in or for the 2001 season. At that time Leader made both lead free soldered and welded pans, this was soldered, in great condition. The bigger evaporator would allow me to handle more taps. This new property had a potential for just over 800 taps but the lay of the land was such that the landowner lived on a dead end road and the county plowed a mountain of snow across the end of the road about 100' past his home. There was no way to get a haul truck in. Talking with the landowner he suggested maybe3 I could pump the sap to the road, it would have been a rise of about 125' and a distance of 3500'. Then we wondered if a neighbor on the larger thru road about 900' back in to this property might work. I looked at that thought. It looked feasable, 900' with the first 250' being about a 1' drop and very wet most of the year but it was still on his land. After that a neighbor owned from there to the road. I stopped and asked an older lady who lived there with her grown son. I asked if I could run a line down the edge of a ravine that went to the road. She said yes, but I had to keep the tubing in the ravine. I studied that and we proceeded. All she wanted was a couple qts of syrup each season. We had an agreement. I then got a lease on the woods, it was about 30 acres with mostly maples and hickories. I then asked my Leader Dealer if they could make recommendations. I made a sketch of the property and they said they would rather come visit it. When thay came they got some ideas on lay of the land and where the maples were with some measurements. They then took it to Leader foe juggestions. A week later we met again at the woods and they laid out the plan.
We then ordered a large order, releaser, moisture trap, tubing for mains and a wet/dry set up. We had 700' of 1.25" conductor line and 700' of dry line. Into that were designed 5 main lines each of 1". We spent much of that summer setting up the wet/dry lines and I think we got 3 mains in. I bought an 850 gal sap tank and we placed it in the woods. During the summer I was able to drive in to the end of the dead end road, then in thru the first hay field with a sort of driveway along one edge of the field all uphill at about 7-8% for maybe 600', along a hedge row to an opening to a second field, then downhill at about 5-6% to another hedge row, then down just 1-2% to a passage thru into a third field. Then a slight decline for about 200 more feet, along that hedge row then down at 5-6% downgrade to the opening to the woods at that point. Straight ahead before the last hedge row was also the woods but not any good for a 4x4 truck. As we endered the lower entry to the woods I had to turn sharply left about 100' in, then back my truck with 16' tilt bed equipment trailer down a slanted barely wide enough wet slippery roadway down along another hedge row top where the 850 gal tank would set. It was so tight that I often needed to correct where the trailer was going and I had no room to steer the front of my truck to turn even a little. We uswed my Polaris 4x4 450 with a 2500 lb winch to assist. Because the roadway was muddy and sloped towards the hedge row we only ever needed to pull the trailer uphill. We did it by anchoring the 4x4 to a tree, then the winch cable to a pulley on the rear of the trailer and back up to another tree. I think we had to do that 3x over a 460' distance. Then we had to move the tank which was an old milk tank, not a light weight sap tank across what was left of an old rock wall, but was almost leveled at that point. We winched the tank, which rested on a full length pressure treated sled I had made to support it on the soft ground where the tank would rest. Using the winch, pulleys, 6 adult helpers with 5 and 6' long 1.25" and 1.5" pipes to pry with we got it in place and leveled. I then placed the homemade interlocking covers on to keep leaves out.
For much of that I hired a retired buddy and his son, a teacher off for the summer, plus 2 grandsons a buddy of one grandson and my oldest son's nephew. We got the wet/dry lines up except we needed a few supports to maintain proper level. Once school restarted I then had 1 grandson, the buddy who's son taught school and an occasional extra. We finished supporting the wet/dry and started putting in the mains. I think we got 3 of the mains in for that next season and we had about 400 taps.
Then in the next 3 years we added more mains and taps to where we got to close to 700 but never reached the max total.
Then my 3 main helpers, 2 grandsons in college and a friend also in college all graduated and got good jobs, they were then gone. One grandson did still help but only occasionally. At that point I buddied up with my permenantly disabled brother in law. We did the one lease I'd gotten first but after a couple of years we both decided we needed to cut back. The landowner now does that bush, He's now retired. I then had sold the last signed lease to an Amish friend who still has it today. He has a 120+HP 4x4 tractor (yes, he's Amish) with a front end loader. As he was placing his 1000 gal tank where my tank had been, he carried my tank out slinging it under the bucket on 2" straps and set it on my 16' gooseneck trailer. I had gotten the gooseneck to help haul sap. On it I carried 3 IBC totes, each 275 gal. I plumbed 2 together for sap, and the 3rd was kept seperate. In it I carried 100-150 gal of permeate to clean the sap tanks as I emptied them. On just a couple of occasions I drained the 3rd tank and hauled sap in it too. When hauling sap, if I had enough I filled each tank to completely full, thus I always called it 280 gal. I never had more than 2 tanks partially full, the permeate tank and one of the sap tanks. The few times I carried sap in all 3 they were all topped off. No sloshing.
At the point I had my most taps I had 1320, those 2 leases I had not tapped my own because I didn't have the time to collect the 7 tanks and I didn't have vacuum there.
As I sold the one lease I put vacuum on some of the trees around my own sugarhouse, and my brother in law helped me get up to about 425 taps there , then he decided he could no longer do it, his permenant disability got the better of him.
I then sold my 3x8 evaporator and thought I was going to retire, but in short order I changed my mind, bought a 2x6 evaporator and will again be tapping my own woods for 2025. In the first year I hope to get 200-300 taps, eventually to about 425 all running directly to the sugarhouse on vacuum. If I decide to go any bigger I'll talk to my neighbor. She has a few rows of maples, many sugars but mixed with reds that her father planted over 40 yrs ago. They are in rows, about 15-20' apart in the rows and between the rows. I'm not sure how many rows there are, near theroad there are 6 or 7 rows, I don't know how far back the rows go, but the 2 closest to my property are about 500' long. I knoe at least 4 rows are that long and 2 might be another 60-80' long. That land is totally overgrown, she doesn't ever go into it except where she has a trail over to a spot on my land where she dumps her horse manure.