Jack Frost's Last Stand

In my last blog post, I mentioned that we were planning to tap trees on Valentine's Day....



Well, Jack Frost decided to dig his ice-capped heels in deep! It was 16 degrees BELOW zero upon sunrise on February 14th and our high temp was 4 degrees....not much warmer in the days that followed, either!  Needless to say, we did not tap trees....

We finally began thawing out, for real, just a couple of days ago.



And, yesterday...WOW!...who could ask for a better day to tap trees?

Unfortunately, our fearless leader, Don, was suffering with a stomach virus which threatened to rob us of several perfect sap-collecting days.



Thankfully, while Don confined himself to bed for the day, Will, Rosie, and our good friend, Rob, tapped most of our trees.

And, not a moment too soon...we're getting crazy-awesome sap flow today!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Don is mostly healthy again, though not as lively as usual just yet.  He, Will and Grace finished up a few things out in the woods first thing this morning, and got the releaser going.  He's very proud that all his engineering feats are working properly.  

In order to overcome elevation challenges, Don and Will built four sap ladders.  Those sap ladders, plus a wet-dry line come into this thing you see below:




It's called a manifold or booster...

It's purpose is to create a vacuum "pool" at the place where 5 sap lines converge, in order to support the vacuum pump, which is 900 feet away.   In other words, it brings together all the sap from every tapped tree into the one tube that carries it all down to the sugar house! Cool!  Don's a pretty smart feller, eh?

We still have one run of trees on high-vac gravity, along with 5 or 6 bucket taps.  That sap we collect using our very handy ranger....

...And add it to our bulk sap tank!

We had a decent run for our first day!  Our RO is presenting some challenges, however, they are surmountable, so it should be up and running in a couple of days.  

Stay tuned for more on that, the process of concentrating, boiling, and (my favorite part!) bottling...


As always, we welcome visitors.  We hope to be boiling full-steam later this week, so feel free to stop by next weekend to see....and smell...delicious maple syrup in the making!  

We'll have syrup for sale as well.

















                   

How Interesting!

This photo was taken on February 3, 2014....

This one was taken on February 1, 2015...















And these are from today, February 6, 2016....

I find it quite amusing that my son, Nathaniel, moved back to south-eastern PA, in part to escape the snow, and he's the one who got two feet of it last weekend!  

Definitely not a typical winter for Central New York.  Guess we're going to learn how an atypically- warm winter with much less than average snow (annual average over last decade is 90.5 inches!) affects sap production.... How interesting!  

The past two weeks we've been working steadily to get ready, knowing that we are going to have an early maple season compared to last year, in which the sap didn't flow until...March 6th!

March 4, 2015!

Last year we were tapping trees in 3 feet of snow and temperatures in the teens.  Poor Rosie didn't have snowshoes last year!  Her grandparents gave her a set for Christmas and she didn't even get to break them in this year.


Now, we are supposed to get a few inches of snow in the next week, but nothing even remotely close to last year's conditions.  And, we're expecting to have our usual mid-February "deep freeze" that will last only about a week.







We'll continue our preparations...



Wiring the lights in the sugar shack....

                               Bringing the sap mainline down to the sugar shack....

                                                               Cleaning out the bulk tanks and setting up the releaser....

This week we'll place the RO in the sugar shack and plumb it into the feed pump...

                                                                                                                                                                                    And, hopefully, we get to test out the whole system with the little bit of sap we're collecting from the high-vac gravity line and 5 or 6 bucket taps we have around the house.

Looking at the monthly forecast, we are planning to tap the bulk of our trees next weekend...Valentine's Day!  Nathaniel's coming up for a visit, so we'll have an extra pair of hands, and this mama will be happy to celebrate Valentine's Day with a home-cooked dinner and special dessert for the whole family!

The sweet good-bye of winter is on it's way, My Friends!