MapleAcres

Into the woods by 5:00 AM. Back to the farmhouse by 7:30 PM. We were determined to boil the sap we collected yesterday. Setup is a lot of work. We hoped to be prepared this season by taking a week in February to get ready. Mother Nature had other plans.

Cooking syrup on February 1st is unusual, but in the woods it looks and feels like mid-March with the melting snow and sun. This isn’t a January thaw of only a few days.

Setup and configured the R/O. Added insulation and a cover to the wash tank in hopes of solving last years problem with not reaching 113 during wash cycle. That took 1 ½ hours. We’ll see if it helps. It’s the type of insulation used with hot water heaters. The R/O manufacturer claims heat lost from the wash tank causes the low temperature.

Started the fire under the evaporator by 11:00 AM, but didn’t get to focused cooking until 1:00 PM when the R/O was ready and running. R/O finished by 5:00 PM. Went 6 Brix to 7 Brix.

It takes several hours to get finished syrup when starting from raw sap or concentrate. Two batches into the milk can. Batches were ready by 5:50 PM and 7:00 PM. The syrup looks good but may not be Golden/Delicate like last season.

The fast centrifugal transfer pump is repaired. A small pebble was lodged in the impeller.

Still some issues with the new R/O feed pump. It won’t reach 25 PSI during the concentrate flush cycle. It’s a short cycle meant to capture concentrate in the R/O before washing. We’ll loose some concentrate by omitting this cycle, but we don’t think it will hurt the membrane. Overall we’re still skeptical this new feed pump is suitable for our R/O. We have a single 4” membrane. That pump may be more suitable for R/Os with 8” membranes and multiple membranes.

Puddles were frozen overnight, but the air temperature was 34. Mostly sunny and 45 during the day. Forecast for upper 20’s tonight and next night. Trees dripped some, but we need a good freeze again.

We accomplished the goal of cooking the sap, but it was a long day.

The 101 buckets from Monday were full. The 200 taps from yesterday were less. But we still collected 310 gallons. If we had been fully tapped to catch all of the run that started on Monday, we would have had over 600 gallons. But the sap is only 1.5 Brix.

Into the woods by 7:30 AM. Got a tank of water for the R/O. Before using it, we have to rinse the membranes with 200 gallons of plain water. The collecting tank is in use now with 85 gallons of sap. If we hadn’t got the water first, we would have been out of luck getting water.

Washed the storage tanks. Started connecting the pipes. Brought the R/O into the woods. We’ll setup the R/O tomorrow.

Started collecting at 2:45 PM. Done by 4:30 PM. Tried to use our fast centrifugal pump but it wouldn’t turn over. It’s been three seasons since we last used it. Should have tested it. Most likely it needs cleaning.

It feels like mid-March in the woods. Didn’t freeze over night. Up to 43 today. Started cloudy but the sun appeared by Noon. The run is over. We need a freezing night again to prime the next run. Freezing nights are forecast for the coming days.

Back to the house by 4:45 PM.

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

It’s January 29th and we are tapping. The earliest ever for us. It was 48 on Christmas. We had two weeks of Winter between January 9th and 23rd. Snow storm with 12”-14” of snow and blowing. Then below zero for 6 days. But it started warming by January 25. We have the freeze/thaw cycle now. And that cycle is forecast to continue for the next 10 days. The trees don’t know about the calendar: they follow the weather. Even if we get a cold snap in February, it will just pause the sap. The weather pattern is here now.

This was already an El Nino year which causes warmer air to push farther North mitigating the cold air pushing down from the Artic. But temperatures have been much warmer then El Nino alone. It’s climate change. We’ve been 10-15 degrees warmer then normal. The river didn’t freeze until the below zero days in January, but it will melt again.

We put the pressure gauge on a tree this morning along with a bucket and spout. No tree pressure or sap at 9:00 AM. But the sun came out and by 12:30 PM the tree was at 14 PSI and the spout dripping fast. It tested at 2 Brix. So we prepared to tap.

Into the woods by 1:00 PM. 100 taps up by 4:45 PM. Planning for 400 this season.

2023 was a remarkable season. We had the best quality and highest yield we ever recall. We made three milk cans of Grade A Golden, Delicate Taste syrup. The rest of the crop was just over the Golden standard at the higher end of the Grade A, Rich Taste scale. No dark syrup. We didn’t do anything different for processing, so mother nature had her own reasons for the quality. Before March, we had an open winter with little snow. We had good weather patterns for sap in March, but nothing exceptional so weather patterns don’t explain the better quality either.

The yield of 2 pints per tap was exceptional. We could have made more syrup, but once the Brix dropped to 1 or below it’s a lot of processing for a few gallons of syrup. The R/O makes it possible to cook, because we can get 5 or 6 Brix before cooking, but it’s still a lot of processing. It was unsettling to dump full buckets of sap like we did on March 28, but the sap was 1 Brix or below. While we tapped the end of February, sap likely flowed much of February due to favorable weather patterns. So by the end of March the sugar the trees had stored was depleted even through there was water available to make sap: with less sugar available, the sap had lower Brix. We can mitigate that by tapping earlier.

The R/O was a problem again this season. The impeller on the feed pump breaking was unfortunate, but once we saw the impeller was plastic, breaking was inevitable because bark or other matter does get into the sap and will damage the impeller. While the new feed pump it all stainless steel and tougher, it feeds a larger volume of sap into the R/O causing temperature problems during the wash cycle because the larger volume of water passes through before friction heats it. We’ll see La Pierre, the R/O manufacturer, in October at the NAMSC annual meeting in MA and ask about how to mitigate the heat loss during the wash cycle. We’ll likely need to try an insulation wrap around the wash tank and a cover. The wash tank is open to the air and could radiate a lot of heat.

Hopefully only more more season on buckets. Planning for upgrades to a vacuum system and new evaporator by 2025.

Sunny and warm today. Temperature up to 85. We’re in a 3-4 day warm spell. Average for April 12 is 50. We’re memorializing it to draw attention to climate change. Unexpected and large changes in temperature, both up and down, are signs of climate change. By the weekend it turns cooler with possible snow flurries.

Into the woods by 8:00 AM to finish cleanup. Washed the floor. Got all the tanks in the building. Brought equipment back to the farmhouse. Done in the woods by 1:30 PM. Then put away equipment at the farmhouse and washed milk cans and pails. Finished by 2:45 PM.

Cleanup stretches over almost two weeks because we can’t focus the entire day on it because of our other work. Cleanup can be completed in 3-4 days if we dedicate the days to it. Next year we should be able to dedicate the days to it.

We’ll write a reflection piece on the season in a few days.

Into the woods by 8:00 AM to clean the evaporator. It cleaned up without much effort. Pans done by 1:00 PM. After lunch cleared the firebox, then the finishing and bottling pan.

Tomorrow clean the floor, bring tanks into the building, clean the milk cans and bring all equipment back to the farmhouse.

A coating to 1” of snow was forecast for overnight, but we didn’t get any snow or rain. 40 overnight. Cloudy and cold this morning. Sun appeared around 1:00 PM. Temperature up to low 50s.

Back to the farmhouse by 3:00 PM.

Into the woods at 12:30 PM to bring in the R/O. Later in the afternoon we prepared the membrane for off-season by adding SMBS to the storage canister. We’ll send the membrane out for cleaning again.

Measured the empty space in the woodshed. We burned 6.9 cords of wood. That’s the consequence of the failed R/O feed pump.

Tomorrow we clean the evaporator.