central and southern Ohio 2024/2025

[Iwantsyrup]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Another thought would be to just use new tubing since it’s only a couple dozen trees with 1-2 foot drops on average. I was gifted a brand new 500’ roll of tubing last year from my Mon when we got into the hobby so I have plenty. I’m just mostly a clean and reuse kind of guy on anything reusable so that didn’t cross my mind at first honestly. I could make an exception to my typical frugality in this case if it could possibly lead to much better results and time saved. I appreciate you guys taking the time to reply. Happy new year!

[SeanD]

There's no back flow from a drop into a bucket, so there's no concern for shortening the viability of the tap hole. You won't notice any difference in results from the used sanitized drops any more than you will from your used-sanitized taps or used-sanitized buckets. Save your efforts and plastic waste. Reuse the sanitized drops from last year. Save that 500' roll for when you are ready to expand.

[buckeye gold]

Exactly SeanD, that's why I said flush them with a disinfectant and use them. If anything new is used it would be a new spile

[Iwantsyrup]

Anybody eyeballing tapping after this deep freeze? Decent temps coming up later this weekend. Or do we holddd? :-)

[Driftwood]

Cincinnati area here. I’ll be tapping this Saturday. We’ll have ~100 trees to get done.

[buckeye gold]

I plan to tap this coming weekend as well (Sat. 1/25 or 1/26/25 ). It might take a couple days for the trees to thaw, but this snow cover has the ground insulated and I pulled some snow back Monday and the ground was not frozen at all under it. I think we'll have some really big runs coming in the next couple weeks. I hope the sugar is up. I am wondering how the drought last summer effected it. My fear is we'll see a fast warm up and it will be another short season. Looks like some long boiling days coming to me. I have 140+ taps ready to go. Ross County here.

[Driftwood]

Got the taps in yesterday. 95 in total. I’d say about 60% of the trees were running when tapped. Let the first several gallons flush the lines last night, then started collecting this morning. Trees were moving well this afternoon. I’d say there is a good 25-30 gallons in the tank already.

[Iwantsyrup]

25 trees tapped here yesterday. Collected about 12-13 gallons of sap about 4 o’clock today. I guess it’s here we go!