{"id":227,"date":"2010-04-12T14:10:10","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T14:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.mapleacres.com\/?p=227"},"modified":"2010-04-12T14:10:10","modified_gmt":"2010-04-12T14:10:10","slug":"thoughts-on-the-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/?p=227","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on the Season"},"content":{"rendered":"

Patience.\u00a0 Without patience the season would have been a bust.\u00a0 The weather started out very favorable the first days of March.\u00a0 The last week of February had the same weather pattern and we would have benefited from tapping about five to seven days earlier.\u00a0 But March 9th the weather changed: first foggy and warm with no freezing night, then sunny and warm with no freezing nights.\u00a0\u00a0 It wasn’t until March 20th that the weather pattern changed back to freezing nights.\u00a0 That saved us.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

We knew this was an El Nino<\/a> year which creates warmer winters in the Mid-West.\u00a0 Still, we wonder what the longer term impacts of climate change will have on maple syrup production.\u00a0 We need that alternating freezing\/thawing cycle for sap runs.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

57 \u00bd gallons is 96% of an average season.\u00a0 So pretty much an average season.\u00a0 From our contacts with other producers we were fortunate.\u00a0 Producers in Vermont are reporting 1\/3 of a crop.\u00a0\u00a0 Even other Wisc producers are reporting poor crops.\u00a0 All of Wisc had the warm weather pattern.<\/p>\n

We collected 2440 gallons of sap.\u00a0 We made 57 \u00bd gallons of syrup.\u00a0 That works out to 42 to 1 for the ratio of sap to syrup.\u00a0 And an average of 2.02 Brix for the sap.<\/p>\n

We started tapping March 2 and were completed by March 3.\u00a0 We put out 423 taps.\u00a0 We pulled taps on March 30th so we had\u00a0 29 days of potential sap.<\/p>\n

There is a question about next season.\u00a0 Our hope is to do some upgrades: replace the concrete floor in the syrup building.\u00a0 Maybe get a new evaporator.\u00a0\u00a0 But some events, that we don’t control,\u00a0 need to work themselves out.\u00a0 We will make syrup next year, but maybe not the way we hope.<\/p>\n

The annual meeting of the North American Maple Syrup Council<\/a> is in London, Ontario in October.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We plan to attend again.\u00a0 And we will be back here in late February or early March 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patience.\u00a0 Without patience the season would have been a bust.\u00a0 The weather started out very favorable the first days of March.\u00a0 The last week of February had the same weather pattern and we would have benefited from tapping about five to seven days earlier.\u00a0 But March 9th the weather changed: first foggy and warm with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-season-93"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","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=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}