With some help from EmGi and his Trail3DPrint plugin, we’ve modeled and 3D printed all of our sugar bushes! We’re going to hang these in the sugar shack and print an extra one for the farmhouse (and our house too). We’re also waiting to print the trail map of our home property. We’ve added six new trails this year with a seventh in progress, that should put us around 6.5 miles. Each print took ~10 hours to print on our Bambu Lab X1C and used ~$4 worth of filament. Lots of cool things still to print this summer now that the season is over and we have a little more time on our hands.

Our last boil was on April 3rd and we finished thickening up what was left in the evaporator this week. Accounting for the 8,900 gallons of sap we sold and ~10,000 gallons of sour sap we purposely dumped, we ended up with around 80% of a crop. Not every year can be a great year, 2025 was much more like 2021/2022 than 2023/2024.

We’re working on removing excessive droplines while untapping this month. Specifically, any tree smaller than 8″ diameter, and any multi-trunk tree with too many drops. So far we’ve completed Faust road and reduced the tap count from 2856 to 2480, taking out 13% (376) of the taps. We actually think more taps have been removed over the years, we always seem to have extra spouts left over each season, but we lost the exact count. We expect to collect just as much sap next year, but with less leaks, cost, and effort.

Finally, here’s our annual one second every day video from the 2025 maple season!

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.