Into the woods by 7:30 AM. Fueled the tractor. Loaded up buckets and covers and headed out to tap. Switched to the 5/16” spouts. They are better for the tree because of the smaller 7/16” hole. However, they are plastic and aging causing some to break. Since they are plastic we can drill them out if necessary. Got 200 more buckets up. We do batches of 50 buckets at a time. Helps keep track of our count. Takes about 1 ½ hour for a batch of 50. Hoping for 100 more this week yet.
We’ll need to collect tomorrow. The 100 buckets from yesterday are over half full. And still dripping. Sap running on the new taps today too. Pressure still at 5 PSI. Cloudy and up to 40 today. Snow showers forecast overnight, but no accumulation.
We have a pedometer application on our phone now. Adding the number of steps taken during the day to the Season @ A Glance. We do a lot of walking during tapping and collecting. But we estimate the greatest number of steps during days we cook. There’s a lot of walking to check on things and firing. Anticipating 2.5 to 3 miles for each hour cooking. Curious to see how close we come to that estimate. One mile is about 2000 steps.
Tomorrow morning we have to prepare for collecting. The first task is a tank of water for the R/O. We use the wagon and 225 gallon collecting tank to fetch the water so we need to do that first before collecting otherwise that equipment will be engaged.
Back the farmhouse by 4:00 PM