The day broke cold, but sunny. It was down to about 20 overnight. We headed into the woods around 9:00 am to boil down the rest of the sap on hand. It was nice in the woods. The sun was warm. A perfect spring day. Visitors stopped by. We talked with them as we worked. Had a batch of syrup ready to come off the evaporator by 1:00 pm. We had to filter it twice. There is a lot of sugar sand this year. Its a little more work to filter it twice, but it does make the syrup crystal clear. Cloudy syrup just doesn’t look nice.

By noon or so the sun had warmed the trees enough to start dripping. But not enough to collect yet. It was too cold over night. The frost is still in the ground too. The big sap runs come when the frost comes out of the ground. But the snow is settling in the woods.

We were hoping to finish up for the day by 4:30 or 5:00. But another batch of syrup came ready. When the hydrometer starts to float we want to get the syrup off the evaporator. So setup for finishing and bottling again. This batch was troublesome. Filtered it twice. But it was still cloudy in the bottles. Ugh. Turned out the bottling pan had a build of sugar sand too. Cleaned that out. Filtered once more. Then bottled again. Took longer. Didn’t complete everything until 7:00 pm. But the storage tanks are empty. Now we wait for more sap.

Today’s count.
27 quarts bottled
75 quarts total
0 gallons of sap
3 visitors