Season 91 is over.\u00a0 It turned out to be a great season.\u00a0 We bottled 8 more quarts from the sap remaining in the evaporator.\u00a0 That gives us 294 quarts, 73 \u00bd gallons total for the season.\u00a0 This actually bests 2008’s crop by 2 quarts.\u00a0\u00a0 The week of March 23rd things did not look promising for a good season, but things turned around.\u00a0 The season was never overwhelming.\u00a0 Frequently there is a period of 3 or 4 days when we get 1200 gallons of sap.\u00a0 Then we have long nights to process it all.\u00a0 But this year all the sap runs were spaced out.\u00a0 We collected 9 times and picked up 3000 gallons of sap.\u00a0 So doing the math we get a ratio of about 41 gallons of sap for 1 gallon of finished maple syrup.<\/p>\n
We were into the woods by 9:30 am to work on cleanup.\u00a0 By 10:15 am the sap in the finishing pan was ready.\u00a0 It helped that we let it boil the night before or it would have been much later in the day before it was ready. \u00a0<\/p>\n
After bottling\u00a0 we went into full scale cleanup mode.\u00a0 The biggest task was to clean the evaporator pans, both inside and the bottom.\u00a0 The inside cleaned pretty easy as we had it soaking in cleaning solution overnight.\u00a0 But the bottom is always a chore.\u00a0\u00a0 The pan bottom is exposed to the wood fire.\u00a0 It gets a thick layer of burnt on carbon.\u00a0 We use oven cleaner, a putty knife for scrapping, and scotchbrite pads\u00a0 for cleaning the final layers of black burnt on carbon.\u00a0 It took a good 3 hours of work but in the end the bottom was a clean and shiny as the inside.<\/p>\n
By 5:30 pm the evaporator was cleaned, along with the finishing and bottling pans. Ashes cleaned from the evaporator.\u00a0\u00a0 All the buckets and covers were stored for another year.\u00a0 Only a few easy and less urgent task remained: washing the floor; cleaning the spouts, bringing the remaining syrup out of the woods. \u00a0<\/p>\n
So ends season 91.\u00a0 We are grateful for the help from family and friends and grateful for the good crop.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Season 91 is over.\u00a0 It turned out to be a great season.\u00a0 We bottled 8 more quarts from the sap remaining in the evaporator.\u00a0 That gives us 294 quarts, 73 \u00bd gallons total for the season.\u00a0 This actually bests 2008’s crop by 2 quarts.\u00a0\u00a0 The week of March 23rd things did not look promising for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2009-season-92"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}