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!
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| 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!
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