Our eleventh season is off to a great start. On Friday we filled a dozen barrels and still had enough chilled concentrate on hand to boil down another twelve drums on Monday. It took a few days for the woods to fully thaw, but with fresh tap holes and melting snow reserves, the sap ran strong all week. Tomorrow’s freeze should help recharge the trees’ sap reserves—and thankfully, this weekend gave us a chance to refill our own sleep reserves.

Last year we posted about adding a second vacuum pump to our home pump house, and how one of the bearings went bad. Last month we had some help replacing the bearing on the first pump, and also replacing a damaged seal on the second pump. The seal showed signs of heat damage, which resulted in a little gearbox oil passing over to the claws and out the exhaust. Both pumps are ready to go, we just have to re-attach the VFDs and PVC inputs.

We’ve readied 39 of 41 mainlines this month, tomorrow we’ll fix the last two (dead end tree uprooted and high tensile wire snapped), then we’ll start tapping! Only 6800 holes to drill this year instead of 22,000, we’ll be done in four days with plenty of time before our next thaw!

We’ve been enjoying our time in the woods preparing for the upcoming sap season. When we initially setup our woods we ran all of the mainlines next to trees for side tie support. After a decade of storms and natural forest growth, sometimes there aren’t any close trees to side tie to anymore! We’ve been putting up more and more support beams lately, 1/2″ rebar is our go to choice. It’s cheap, easy to install, and we can reuse it if a tree falls on it because it bends instead of breaks. In most spots we use a direct hose clamp to secure the line. For areas that we lift for trail access in the off-season we use a hose clamp at the top with suspension wire.

In September we mentioned that we sold our Brass road property so that we could focus more energy in the sugar shack and on our home woods. We also closed on our Faust and Robinson road properties a month later. Our Christmas busy season was much less stressful this year since we had more time to dedicate, and our home woods is already in better shape than ever before for the upcoming season. This year we should have the time and resources to achieve maximum yield, while also tending to our product/sales (and family) duties. We can’t wait to see how Kelly/Calvin/Jacob do on our former sugar bushes. Only a couple weeks until we tap!