MapleAcres

Into the woods by 9:00 AM to bottle. Finished by Noon. 33 overnight but the puddles are still frozen in the morning so the ground is still cold. Sunny and low 50s today. Trees did drip. Hoping to collect tomorrow.

If the season ended right now, we’d have 2/3 of a crop. We have approximately 50 gallons now, but not all bottled yet. We expect 75 gallons. There is still some favorable weather ahead so we’ll press on, but it may be smaller incremental runs.

16 overnight and down to 13 at dawn. Sunny and up to low 30s. No woods activity. We did check the evaporator because we left the valve run yesterday. The evaporator could hold it all, but it’s more than we normally do. We’ll need to cook about and hour next time before we can start drawing from the tank.

Into the woods by 5:00 AM to cook. It took an hour to clean the syrup pan. We accounted for that time when planning our day. But we had unexpected problems cooking that set us behind. We expected to finish between 11:00 AM and 11:30 AM. But didn’t finish until 12:45 PM when we just left the valve open to run sap into the evaporator and went to the farmhouse.

The sap was restricted from the tank into the evaporator. It looked like a good stream, but it wasn’t enough to gain sap depth in the evaporator. We had to reduce the intensity of the fire to accommodate the reduced flow so we didn’t run low on sap and burn the pans. Checked for obstructed pipes by disassembling the pipe sections to check for blockage. Looked good. After studying the situation, we’ve concluded the pipes from the tanks to the evaporator are misaligned causing low points that force the sap to flow uphill. Liquids don’t like to flow uphill. We have to reposition the large storage tank to level the pipes and eliminate the low points. We move the large tank when washing. That can cause it to get out of alignment. It didn’t help that the valve on the concentrate tank wasn’t completely open. It was about 7/8 open. With normal alignment it wouldn’t be a problem. We’ll correct these issues before the next session of cooking.

The day cooking.
6:30 AM R/O start
7:00 AM 4”
8:00 AM 7 ¼”
8:05 AM batch
8:30 AM R/O done
8:50 AM batch
9:00 AM 7 ¾”
9:35 AM batch
10:00 AM 6”
10:20 AM batch
11:00 AM 4 ½”
11:20 AM batch
12:00 PM 3”
12:20 PM batch
12:30 PM 2 “
12:45 PM left for farmhouse

34 overnight, but puddles again frozen indicating the ground is cold. Temperature dropped as the morning progressed. It was 25 at 12:45 PM and felt much colder with the wind chill. Cloudy all day. Snow flurries by 1:30 PM for a few hours.

Picked up 10 gallons that dripped overnight in good running trees. Added that to the tank for cooking today.

Back to the farmhouse by 12:45 PM.

Into the woods by 6:00 AM to cook. Finished by 12:45 PM.
The day cooking
6:30 AM R/O start
7:00 AM 3”
8:00 AM 6”
8:30 AM batch
9:00 AM 8”
9:10 AM batch
9:10 AM R/O done
9:55 AM batch
10:00 AM 6 3/4”
10:40 AM batch
11:00 AM 4 ¾”
11:20 AM batch
11:50 AM batch
12:00 PM 2 ¾”
12:30 PM batch
12:45 PM 1 ¼”
12:45 PM done

28 overnight. Low 50s and sunny. Warmed up fast again. But cold weather is forecast again for the next thee days. Tomorrow doesn’t get above freezing and lows in the teens. Saturday and Sunday are also cold. But next week looks promising again.

There was sap last night and today. Not a lot, but with the forecast cold weather it’s better to collect it because liquid today, ice tomorrow. And we’d have ice in the buckets for the next 3-4 days.

While finishing cooking we washed the tanks. Picked up 190 gallons. We’ll cook tomorrow, but it will take a good hour in the morning to wash the syrup pan. We couldn’t get a head start on that because we had to finish cooking.

Back to the farmhouse by 4:30 PM.

Collected 235 gallons but we expected more based the freeze/thaw from yesterday and today. The trees are dripping, but slowly. There is still frost in the ground. The recent cold weather may have refrozen the ground and locked up the water again. It was 33 overnight, but ice on puddles indicate the ground is cold yet.

Warmed up quickly this morning. Up to mid 50s and mostly sunny. Into the woods by Noon to check about collecting. Its been six days since we last collected and we wanted to get the sap that’s there. It looks good.

Back into the woods by 1:00 PM to wash the syrup pan and tanks. It took an hour to clean the syrup pan because there was a thick layer of nitre. Glad its done so we can get started cooking in the morning without the delay to clean the pan.

Back to the farmhouse by 4:30 PM.

20 overnight. Sunny and mid 40s today. That cold spell impacted the trees more than expected. It’s taking time for the trees to recover. They are dripping now. Should dip into the night. Hopefully we can collect tomorrow.

We have six milk cans. Five are brushed stainless steel and one is shiny (304) stainless steel. We use the shiny can, number 2017, for transferring finished syrup from the finishing pan to the bottling pan and the other five cans for batches of syrup from the evaporator as we cook. To better manage the syrup, we wanted to number the milk cans. Sometimes we want to finish and bottle in a different order then we then we filled the milk cans with batches from the evaporator. Rather than assigning a generic number scheme like 100, 101, 102, etc. we stenciled on the year we acquired the can. Now we have a unique numbers on the cans so we can manage them better.

4 overnight. Sunny and 40 the day, but trees are still recovering from the cold spell. Checked the woods at 1:00 PM, but not much activity.

We’ve made syrup for many years, but there are still small innovations that we discover like long reach matches that make work easier. They are 8” long. It’s much easier to light the burners under the finishing pan and bottling pan. The kitchen matches were 2” long and tended to burn out before all three burners were lit.

Into the woods by 9:15 AM for bottling. Our strategy to fill the milk can with less syrup worked. We were able to dump the milk can into the finishing pan and bottling pan by our self. The milk can was 11 lbs to 16 lbs lighter. We’ll continue using this strategy of less syrup in the milk can. We have five milk cans so we should be able to manage the inventory.

22 overnight. Sunny and up to 35 today. Trees thawed slowly but started dripping leisurely in the afternoon. Tomorrow should be similar to today. Waiting to see how much they drip.

Bottled 20 qts and 11 pts. Back to the farmhouse by 1:45 PM.

Cold overnight. Down to 8. Sunny but only 28 today by late afternoon. Morning was in the teens.

Into the woods by 1:00 PM to prepare for bottling. Almost scorched the bottling pan. It had about a half inch of ice from cleaning water that remained in the pan. Started the burner to melt the ice, but the pan heated faster then the ice melted. We caught it before the pan was damaged.

The syrup in the milk cans is very close to done. It was only about half a degree from finished density. It’s nice to get it done quickly, but we have to monitor when we take syrup off the evaporator, so it doesn’t get past finished density.

Back to the farmhouse by 5:30 PM.

20 overnight then down to 18 at dawn. Cold all day with high of 29. But it was sunny. It felt like a day in February should feel.

Into the woods by 5:30 AM to cook. Expected an early start because we cleaned the syrup pan yesterday. But the pipes from the storage tank were frozen. We attached a heat tape before leaving the woods yesterday. Turns out that heat tape isn’t working. So the pipe froze up. Took nearly an hour to thaw out with the heat gun.

Otherwise a good day cooking. 10 batches into the milk can. Doing a pH wash on the membrane.

The day cooking
6:30 AM R/O start
7:00 AM 2 ¼”
7:55 AM batch
8:00 AM 5 ¼”
8:40 AM batch
9:00 AM 7”
9:50 AM batch
10:00 AM 9 1/4”
11:00 AM 10 ½”
11:00 AM batch
11:45 AM batch
12:00 PM R/O done
12:00 PM 12 ¼”
1:00 PM 10”
1:05 PM batch
2:00 PM 8”
2:00 PM batch
2:45 PM batch
3:00 PM 5 ¾”
3:35 PM batch
4:00 PM 3 ½”
4:10 PM batch
4:30 PM 3 ½”
5:00 PM 1 ¼”
5:15 PM done

Back to the farmhouse by 5:30 PM after cooking all 440 gallons of sap.