Category Archives Maple Syrup Production

Cheers to another poor, but a well produced season. While it may not be over yet, the 20 gallons of sap I pulled yesterday evening was only at 1% sugar. Two more days of sap run left and then nothing but warm weather both day and night forecast so the season will officially be over! I'm back to boiling outside. I will make a post on my ghetto sugar shack 2.0 and it's short lived life. Time to build a physical shack and build a container for my sap pan.

Still not the best season. When looking at the log we can see that last year I pulled the taps, while this year we are only half way though at best. Grabbed another 20 gallons of sap today. Not great. Not horrible, but not great considering there is 50 taps total. The weather has been very cold for a long time. Now that it is starting to warm up and the sun is going higher, we are being hit with a lot of incoming storms, so low pressure (no sap run) followed by high winds (no sap run) so we take what little we get. The good news is that the sap is holding at 2% sugar. A little less…

I'm running my newly converted and membrane updated reverse osmosis as we speak! I put out 50 buckets this year! I'm quickly leaning that 50 might have been a mistake. That's about 10 too many for me to go get and gather. The RO takes that much longer, etc, etc. Sap dripping from the tree I see from last year's log the season started 10 days earlier. It's much colder this season. Heck, it just snowed today. With my 50 taps I received 40 to 45 gallons of sap the first warm and and another 25 gallons of sap the next. While waiting on new filters for my RO, all my sap froze solid. Yeah, it's been challenging to say…

Sometimes it seems you can't win for trying.  Isn't that how the saying goes? I recently entered my maple syrup into a local fair as I detailed in a prior post.  The results are in!  Third Place.  I suppose that's not horrible out of all the entries that were there, but I was docked points because it wasn't a "full pint".  Figures.   I was specifically told that for competitions you put them in a honey jar.  Well, that's what I did.   Apparently that's only for the Quart Competition where they use the Beeline #2 Honey Jar.  The pint rules are a little loose, but they need to be a pint.   Being undeterred, I found another fair that's…