Getting organized for tapping this week. There is always great anticipation leading up to tapping. We know the whole season will be a lot of work, but we do it any way. Its a labor of love. As a small operation, we do everything manually. Tapping by hand drill. Buckets and spouts, no tubing. Collecting with 5 gallons pails. Boiling the sap over a wood fired evaporator. The wood shed holds about 12 cords of wood. All cut with chain saws and split by axe and sledge hammer. One cord of wood is 4 feet wide, 4 feet high and 8 feet long. Its a lot of work just cutting the wood. It takes about 10 hours to boil off 200 gallons of sap that results in 5 gallons of finished maple syrup. Yup…that a ratio of 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. And finally all the bottling by hand. At an hourly rate, we would not earn much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Getting organized for tapping this week. There is always great anticipation leading up to tapping. We know the whole season will be a lot of work, but we do it any way. Its a labor of love. As a small operation, we do everything manually. Tapping by hand drill. Buckets and spouts, no tubing. Collecting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2004-season-87"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","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=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mapleacres.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}