Up to 63 today.  Only 40s overnight.  Its interesting to see the day change when you are outside all day.  Daybreak was sunny, but quickly got cloudy.  By 11:00 AM it rained.  Not a lot but got the surfaces wet.  By 2:30 PM it cleared and got sunny.   Tonight close to freezing and cooler tomorrow: only 40s.  We are hoping for one more sap run maybe by Saturday.

 

Into the woods by 8:00 AM.  Its a different routine cooking with the R/O.   Still clean the syrup pan first, but then switch on the R/O.  225 gallons of sap becomes 112 gallons of concentrate.   By 10:00 you are feeding sap into the evaporator.  Batches of syrup become ready quickly.  By 3:00 PM our concentrate tank was empty.

 

We bottled syrup at 3:30 PM.  By 5:15 we were back in the farm house.    By comparison without the R/O it would have been 8:00 PM – 9:00 PM before finishing both today and tomorrow.

 

It felt like a sauna in the syrup building today.  When its warm outside the heat from the steam makes it even warmer inside.