Every season there’s an incident where a valve that should be closed is left open or a valve that should be open is left closed causing sap or syrup to flow where it’s not expected. While bottling this morning, we left a fill valve on the new bottler open causing about 2 gallons to spill onto the floor. We leave the valves open after washing the bottler but forgot to check them before adding syrup. We stepped away after adding a pail of syrup so didn’t notice the spill until most of the syrup was on the floor. The floor was both sticky and slippery until we washed it down with water.
Into the woods by 6:00 AM to bottle. Bottled two milk cans. We have a little room for more syrup, but still have four milk cans of syrup to bottle. Bottled 11 ½ gallons plus 2 gallons for the floor.
We had a storm last night into this morning. Started as rain by 4:00 PM yesterday. Changed to snow by 7:00 PM yesterday. About 4” of snow but the strong wind made for quite the storm. It cleared by 11:00 AM but was still blowing at 6:00 AM when we went into the woods. The sun came out and temperature mid-30s. Today is the first day of Spring.
Back to the farmhouse by 2:15 PM.