It was down to 13 again last night.  But warmed quickly.  By 10:00 AM puddles appeared.  Past days it took to 11:00 AM for puddles.  It got up to 45 this afternoon.  Sunny all day.  

We had a lot to do today so it was constantly moving to get everything done.  

Cleaned the evaporator pan first thing this morning.  Then got the milk can of syrup into the finishing pan.  When the syrup is finished we put in through our filter press.  Unfortunately we got two of the pieces of the filter press in wrong.  We had to take it apart to correct the problem and then re-filter the syrup.  Wasn’t the complete batch.  We caught it early because we noticed the press was pumping hard.

We bottled 26 quarts.  Used our new digital thermometer to monitor the temperature in the bottling pan.  The syrup should not boil.  We keep it between 185 and 200 degrees.  

Cleaned our collecting and storage tanks.  We don’t want fresh sap in dirty tanks.  We knew we would not have help to collect today again so tried to get an early start.  We also knew a lot of sap was in the woods.  We got started by 2:30 PM.  By 5:10 PM we had the first 200 gallons.   Emptied into the storage tank then back out.   By now the trees and an extra three hours to drip and melt.  A lot of the buckets were now full.  We ended up with 430 gallons.  We had to carry in the last 30 because the tank was full.  

We now have 2320 gallons of sap collected.  There should still be another 400 to 600 gallons coming for the season.