Unfortunately not much has happened since our first update two weeks ago. A few of the freezes last week were enough to partially rejuvenate the trees, but our 6+ week old tap holes were just too far gone to really collect enough sap. We believe this is partially due to the low vacuum issues in our previous post, and partially due to the majority of our trees being soft maple, which usually dry out faster compared to hard maple trees.

Last year we re-tapped everything, but this year between other needs in the sugar shack, a so-so weather forecast, and less helpers available, we decided to just re-tap half of one property. We only chose the largest half of the trees, and only one tap on multi-tap trees. We also used the opportunity to hammer in the arc-barb spouts further to see if they still heave when pounded in past the last barb. So far it has been productive, a few of the marginal freezes in the forecast actually got down into the teens and the trees really flowed this week!

This is likely the last of our decent quality sap. It’s actually looked pretty good and made half decent syrup on our last boil. We expect anything past this weekend to produce commercial syrup, which we’ll sell bulk as usual.

The 2025 season has just about mirrored the 2021/2022 seasons, a cold winter with an extreme warmup in March. We’ve made around 2/3rds of a crop so far in a short two week period. It’s hard to predict where the season will go now, our extended forecast shows some ~28° nights coming, which may or may not be cold enough to rejuvenate the trees and extend the season.

This year we completely switched over to arc-barb spouts from middle valley maple. The good part is that we think they produce around 25% more sap compared to conventional spouts. The bad news is that a large number have been heaving out of the trees, dropping our vacuum levels. It’s very frustrating to walk 250+ acres and achieve high vacuum just to watch it slowly drop down ~0.5″Hg every day. We’re still ahead but will have to figure out a different strategy next year.

All of our vacuum pump changes and sap filter are performing great this year. Our Robinson sugar bush improvements have mostly worked as planned, but on Monday we’re swapping out the 20GPM 1/2HP deep well pump in the new releaser with the 10GPM version. A combination of elevation gain, 3/4″ transfer line friction, and atmosphere to vacuum pressure have put the current pump at the edge of its capabilities, causing intermittent failure. In addition to the new pump being rated for an additional 50′ of head, the lower flow rate will reduce the friction in the 3/4″ mainline by 61′. Switching to 1″ mainline over 500′ of distance would have reduced friction loss by 61′, but the pump change is the easier and quicker choice for us right now. Sometimes I forget that I was an engineer before maple farmer!

We finished setting up our new sap filter in November, and finally had a chance to use it last month. Here is a video from the first run at the beginning of February. We had a long freeze up in the middle of the month, but got to run the filter again nonstop last week. It’s done an amazing job so far and is incredibly easy to run/clean!