In preparation for the holiday season we’ve been sending pallets to Amazon every couple of weeks. We sent out eleven of them on October 2nd, over six tons of maple! This time of year it takes about a week and a half to make it to their first Amazon fulfillment center. Another week or so later and Amazon unloads the boxes, putting individual products on different trucks to go all over the country. Over the next two weeks those products arrive at their final fulfillment center, where they are stored until someone buys with Prime. Finally, one of many carriers ships the product the last 5-100 miles. Inventory planning is key this time of year to ensure our products are readily available for the Christmas season, once behind it is almost impossible to catch back up.

Our spring order from Lapierre finally came in on Friday! Since we’ve already prepped much of the woods we’ll start hanging the tubing and setting up the releaser this Thursday. Can anyone guess what the big stainless steel cylinder is? We’ll make a separate post on it later.

We’re already prepping for the 2025 season, and like usual we have a few new things to try! Our droplines are on a three year replacement cycle, so this year we’re installing 8,000 anti-microbial drops from Middle Valley Maple. We’re also trying some of their anti-microbial spouts. We have an experiment setup with the 2,000 taps on the west side of Robinson Road using the new spouts while the 3,000 taps on the east using the “old” arc-barb spouts.

“Middle Valley Maple antimicrobial fittings safeguard against microbes and combat bacteria/fungal microbial growth that develops during the sugaring process over time. This allows for improved sap yield performance, especially when tapping early or when fittings are reused for additional seasons. Middle Valley Maple antimicrobial fittings are manufactured with a silver based antimicrobial ad- ditive that is the first in the industry to be approved be the State of Vermont for organic certification.”