Cloudy and windy today with high about 38.\u00a0 Not so cold last night: 23.\u00a0 Late in the day it cleared.\u00a0 Snow is forecast for Tuesday; possibly heavy.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Into the woods by 8:00 AM.\u00a0 We had pipe problems again.\u00a0 We drain the pipes or else they would freeze.\u00a0\u00a0 Liquid does not move uphill but we had an uphill section of pipe right by the value leading into the evaporator that did not drain.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The tapped sap froze the valve.\u00a0 So we got out the small propane tank to thaw it.\u00a0 Set us back about an hour.<\/p>\n
We started boiling in earnest with the goal of emptying the storage tank.\u00a0 The wonderful aroma of maple was soon all around us.\u00a0 We could even detect it outside the building as the wind blew the stream\u00a0 around.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
We got water with the tractor and milk cans.\u00a0 We got all the finishing equipment and supplies: syrup tester;\u00a0 filter press,\u00a0 filter papers and filter aid, digital thermometer,\u00a0 bottles.\u00a0 While boiling we washed the finishing pan and bottling pan.\u00a0 We were anticipating there would be syrup by the end of the day.<\/p>\n
By 3:30 PM we had a batch of syrup ready on the evaporator.\u00a0 We emptied the batch into the milk can.\u00a0\u00a0 It was small batch.\u00a0 Typically we don’t bottle such a small batch.\u00a0 We would leave it in the milk can and add additional batches to it.\u00a0\u00a0 But since this is the first syrup of the season its special.\u00a0 We wanted to get it bottled so we could say we have syrup!<\/p>\n
February 26th we have syrup.\u00a0 This is very early.\u00a0 Maple syrup is the first crop off the year and this year it came a little early.<\/p>\n
With the storage tank empty and the first syrup bottled, we were done for the day by 5:00 PM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cloudy and windy today with high about 38.\u00a0 Not so cold last night: 23.\u00a0 Late in the day it cleared.\u00a0 Snow is forecast for Tuesday; possibly heavy.\u00a0\u00a0 Into the woods by 8:00 AM.\u00a0 We had pipe problems again.\u00a0 We drain the pipes or else they would freeze.\u00a0\u00a0 Liquid does not move uphill but we had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-season-95"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","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=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}