It was cold over night. Down to the low 20s. Everything was frozen up this morning and most of the day as the temperature only got up to about 33 later this afternoon. With the storage tanks empty and no fresh sap we did a bit of cleaning today.

Cleaned the syrup pan on the evaporator. The sugar in the sap starts to coat the bottom of the pan and disrupts boiling. While we are not exactly sure of the interaction that cause it, the results are that syrup is prone to boiling over even with a low fire under that pan. With a slow day we had a chance to take the pan off and clean the coating before it got so bad as to cause a problem. And we washed some of the stickiness off the floor and washed out he collecting tank.

We also brought back from the woods the finished syrup and brought four milk cans of water to the woods.

And we had snow flurries. Nothing that accumulated but after two days of warm temperatures it was surprising to see. Today turned out to be much colder than was forecast even yesterday.

We now have 144 quarts, 36 gallons, of finished syrup for the season so far.