Wow, it’s been six years since we made our last post about planting trees! We’ve planted a handful every year since then, at least 50+ total now. This year has been no exception. In addition to all of the fruit trees, we’ve also planted some pretty cool maple variations! Here are some pictures, which I’m sure we’ll appreciate in 5-10 years as they grow! Some of our favorites are the four  Japanese/crimson maple variations, weeping willow, sycamore, and gingko.

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!