No woods work. Cloudy. Rainy.
Last season’s procedural error cleaning the evaporator wiped away today. Much of the nitre and scale came off while boiling the cleaning solution and water. The remainder wiped away easily today. Our pan is again the shiny stainless steel we take pride achieving both inside and the bottom exposed to fire. Lesson learned.
Into the woods at 7:30 AM to pickup the last buckets and covers. Done by 8:00 AM. Then started cleaning the evaporator. Syrup pan done by 10:00 AM. Flue pan done by 1:00 PM. Cleaned the bottling and finishing pans too. All pans are clean and stored upside down for next season.
The new MES membrane is in the storage tube. The old membrane is in a wash cycle. Expect it will need a second wash cycle.
25 overnight. Sunny most of the day with temperature in mid 50s. The pressure gauge is still on the tree. It registered -8 PSI. Trees are still moving sap. The leaves are not out yet so this makes sense.
Back to the farmhouse by 4:30 PM.
Picked up buckets this morning. The utility vehicle has low clearance. Driving over mud and ruts it got stuck. Had to get the H to hook up a chain and pull out. Did two more bucket and cover pickups late this afternoon. Still one more pickup of buckets and covers.
Tomorrow is evaporator day. Clean all the pans and empty the ashes from the arch.
One membrane is cleaned. Swap out the membranes tomorrow to clean the second.
Predicting snow for Sunday night into Monday.
And some hail. Quite the variable day for weather. Started sunny and mid 30s. Turned cloudy and windy. Then hail around 11:30 AM followed by bands of snow flurries and sun. Snow made the ground white. The sun would melt it. Several iterations of that pattern this afternoon.
Got more buckets and covers in from the woods this morning. Also prepared the new membrane storage tube. Added a solution of baking soda and water to absorb a slight glue odor. The storage tube is PVC with caps glued on the ends.
Finished all the bottling. 94 ½ gallons total.
Projected total calculated from the sap collected and Brix was 92 gallons. Most likely we under counted sap collected. Here are the calculated syrup totals.
Sap Brix Sap:Syrup Gal Syrup
Mar 2 480 2.5 34.4 14.0
Mar 4 375 2.5 34.4 10.9
Mar 8 650 2 43 15.1
Mar 13 500 2 43 11.6
Mar 17 670 2 43 15.6
Mar 24 470 2 43 10.9
Mar 26 420 2 43 9.8
Mar 30 230 1.5 57.3 4.0
92.0
Every collection was over 200 gallons with two over 650 gallons.
Remaining work:
Get all the buckets and covers in
Clean evaporator, finishing and bottling pans
Clean R/O
Tanks and floor
Back to the farmhouse by 5:00 PM
Used more wood because the first two boils we did not have the R/O working. There is plenty of wood ready to replace it. A complete woodshed full is in the yard waiting to be split and cured.
All the buckets and spouts are down. Want to flush with the hose when we bring them in to rinse out the crud.
Checked the evaporator. Flue pan cleanup looks like it will be easy. Most of the pan already looks clean. Boiling with cleaning solution loosened everything. There are small piles of sentiment from nitre that flaked off on the bottom of the pan. May not even need much scrubbing.
More buckets and spouts down.
27 overnight. Sunny most of the day. Up to 50.
Into the woods by 8:00 AM. The goal was to empty the evaporator and bottle another milk can.
Manged to get the flue pan off and outside without spilling the last of the sap on the floor. A quick rinse then back on the evaporator. Filled a tank of water from the farmhouse while the working on the pan. Filled the flue pan with water and the front syrup pan with the remaining sap. Started cooking.
In past seasons cooking down the last of the sap yielded about 4 gallons of syrup. Ended up with considerably more: about 10 gallons, maybe 11 gallons. The remaining sap must have been very sweet to not need much more cooking By 2:30 PM all sap was in milk cans. Used two milk cans so we had enough room. The finishing pan will hold 15 -20 gallons. But the bottling pan only holds 10 gallons. The plan is to finish it all at once, but use two milk cans when its done and add into the bottling pan as room permits.
We did finish and bottle another milk can.
29 overnight. Sunny all day and 43. Back to the farmhouse by 3:15 PM
Into the woods at 11:45 AM light the burners on finishing pan. Had to change to a new tank of propane. Set us back about 15 minutes. It was 12:00 PM before he finishing pan was going. Bottling by 2:00 PM.
We got the second milk can into the finishing pan before starting to bottle. Lite the burner at 2:35 PM so it would be ready shortly after finishing the first can. Finished bottling by 3:05 PM. The second milk can was ready by 4:00 PM. Finished bottling by 5:15 PM. Clean up done by 5:30 PM and back to the farmhouse.
There is 12 or 13 gallons from the evaporate to cook out. That should give us 4 to 5 gallons of finished syrup. Work on that tomorrow when we bottle again.
Cloudy until 2:00 PM when the sun appeared. Temperature mid 40s.
Emptying the evaporator of the last sap is always a challenge. Have to balance amount of sap remaining in pan so it doesn’t burn, with getting a low level to avoid lengthily cooking on smaller platforms. Achieved a good balance today.
Pondered starting the evaporator or emptying in milk cans to finish in the syrup pan with water in the flue pan. Choose to start the evaporator because it cooks faster. Had a good boil after 45 minutes. Got a batch in the milk can. Then stopped firing. 20-30 gallons remain. Will empty the all reaming sap into milk cans. Fill flue pan with water then cook out the sap in the front syrup pan.
Half the buckets and spout down. Tomorrow we bottle.
50s and sunny today. 35 overnight. Into the woods at Noon. Back to the farmhouse by 4:00 PM.