Over the weekend we had the pleasure of hosting a local girl scout troop for a tour of our maple farm. They enjoyed seeing the animals (Nova acted as my co-guide) and learning about the process of how maple syrup is made, but I’m pretty sure their favourite part was tasting some of mother nature’s liquid gold!
Another good run yesterday and overnight, sap should keep flowing today too. We ran the RO while we slept so that we could have an early morning boil instead of our typical afternoon/evening ones that go way too late. In other news our new experimental road maples next door are running great. We use smaller diameter tubing that creates a natural vacuum, the weight of the sap in the downhill tubing pulls on the trees much like a siphon. It’s nothing like our other woods but it’s easy/cheap to setup and requires little maintenance during the season, plus the sap was 2.5% sugar due to all of the sunlight the trees receive in the summer! Thanks Bob/Cody/Craig!
What an amazing five days to really kick off the season! We made almost 2000 gallons of syrup this week and had three different record breaking days (525 and 665 gallons of syrup made, 25,000 gallons of sap hauled). During this period one of our Busch vacuum pumps sucked sap, seized up, and had to rebuilt at 4AM. One of our pumphouse doors was inadvertently left open during the previous cold spell leaving ~150 gallons of ice that had to be removed manually before collecting new sap. A separate Busch pump also had to be exchanged right before the run due to a worn bearing and gearbox seal leak, but the replacement purred and maintained 95% of its rated vacuum level all week. Today is a well earned day off before next weeks runs, tonight’s freeze should re-energize more sap flow!
