Maple syrup 2017

[celliott]

That's the nice thing about an RO, it becomes more economical when the sugar content is low. If you were boiling raw 1.1% that'd take forever! (86 gallons to 1)

Our sugar content started out low in February but has come up. One of our woods just defies logic. It's 6800 taps, our oldest tubing, the trees seem to be the poorest health (maybe not why they appear) and we have the hardest time keeping vacuum up there. It's been running 2.8-3%!
Other woods have been doing 2.2-2.7%. One guy who sells us sap has a lower elevation woods than all of ours and his sugar has dropped under 2%

The RO takes it all to the same sugar but you get more concentrate from the 2.8% than the 1.6%.

It looks very warm for next week in our area. If we can hold out through the middle of the week we may see a freeze at our higher elevation woods and be alright for awhile longer. Otherwise the end is near.

[Joe Hillmann]

We pulled our taps yesterday.  Over half the trees were budded/budding out.  Pulling the taps went much faster than I had expected.  Now we need to clean all the buckets and finish taking the sugar house down.  With 125 taps we ended up with just over 13 gallons of finished syrup.  With that many taps we  expected 25-30 gallons so it was a dissipating season.  And in order to get that amount we had to tap a month earlier than normal because of a warm spell in February.  Several people I know in the area didn't tap until the middle of march so there season must have been very poor.

[brewdog]

not freezing much here and looks like another week like that/haven't made much syrup  NOVA SCOTIA

[cbla]

I did a small boil on Friday, left the taps out and I am hoping for one more boil. Currently I am at half of last years total.

[Just Me]

  We decided to pull the plug on our maple operation for this season.  We weren't going to have the building in the shape we wanted it.  It was going to be cobbled up to make things work this spring.  This gives us a few months to make things right.  We'll have everything the way we want next season as well as having the whole bush tapped.  We've got 800 ready now with another 1,000 or so to set up.  We've got a new roof on the building, stacks are in along with a chimney for a woodstove.  Insulation, steel ceiling, lighting and plumbing along with a concrete pour to bring the old gutter level with the rest of the slab.  This was a milk house built in 1950.  Grandpa and Dad got out of the dairy business in 1965.  I wish I'd kept track of the man hours we invested cleaning the 52 years of accumulation out.   
  All the equipment is here.  Evaporator, R.O., vacuum pump, pans, filter press, barrels etc. 

You across the street now? I saw all the tubing back in the woods when I went to Preston Saturday and all kinds of projects going on.

[Chuck White]

We got half of our spouts pulled and the lines flushed today.

The other half is planned for Wednesday!

[CJennings]

My sap was mostly running off color and off tasting yesterday so I think it's safe to say it's over this year. I think I made 5 gallons or so. From 15 taps. Hard to say because I boiled the last few batches into sugar and made a lot of candy too. I'm hoping to get a sugar shack up this summer and a proper evaporator set up. If I do I'll get tubing set up next year. I think I may be able to hit 100 taps on my place. I never did finish the maple inventory.

[maple flats]

I finished 5 days ago. I pulled in 840 gal total that day from 2 locations, early that day. One was 550 gal at 1.1% and the rest was at 1.2%. Then it got way too hot, as it got to 81 degrees. I boiled that down and it was very dark syrup.
I ended up with just 174 gal from 750 taps because the sugar % in the sap was at my lowest ever, had it been at my previous 3 season average I'd have gotten .4 gal/tap in syrup. As it was I only got .232 gal/tap.
Now I'm planning for next year. Will change more laterals to 3/16 tied to my vacuum set up, and add 50-75 more taps, possibly even 100. I am also putting my bigger vacuum pump on my vacuum tank and setting it up with a releaser rather than using the tank as a vacuum tank, then I'll be able to add 5-7" more vacuum on the mains and all of the 3/16 will be at max. possible vacuum once they are just 4-6' above the mainline elevation. In 3 areas I'm also going to add a sap ladder or 2 to get better slope on those mains. I got my 7 current sap ladders to perform very well this year, keeping my vacuum loss under 2" from the pump out to the far end of each main, some of which are up to 2000' away from the pump. The longest one at about 2000' long and with 2 sap ladders held at 2" vacuum loss, I thought that was good.

[DelawhereJoe]

Well its not 2017 anymore but, the sap suckers have started in on my red maple trees and the sap is starting to flow. I also cut a small maple sapling to for a walking stick for my youngest son and you could watch the sap drip out of the cut end. Its not going to be long before the red maples think its spring time.