First Boil

First Boil of the season!  Turned out to be a nice day today.  I was expecting cold and snowy.  So there weatherman.

Boiling Sap on the Evaporator

This has basically been my setup for the last 3 years.  I would like to get a real evaporator and a sugar shack.  The problem is if I start investing more in sugaring it’s hard to know where to start.  You can spend 20k pretty quickly and it would take many many seasons to pay it back!  It’s a lot of fun though.  I had intended to post about tapping which happened last Friday. It’s been quite cold most days in the last week but there were 2-3 days of sap runs.  The sap runs when it is above 0 during the day but freezing at night.  I started a few years ago with the small buckets hanging on trees like this:

small plastic sap bucket

But last year I sold most of those buckets and spiles and now I’m using almost all tubing drops with larger 20 liter buckets.  I’ve also starting stringing 5-10 taps together in one run so I don’t have to pick up as many buckets.  This is still very different from the big producers who have everything on lines and vaccuum.  My methods involve lots of hauling buckets around.  But for about 80-90 taps it’s still ok.  Here’s an example of one of the sap lines and a bucket collecting from 4 trees at the end:

sap line with large sap bucket

closeup of large sap bucket and lines

It’s all about 3 weeks later than the last 2 years.  I don’t know if that means it will be a shorter season.  I guess we’ll see.  I do know that I want these chicks outside though!  They’re getting a little cramped in there but I didn’t really want to put them outside when it was still -20 C at night this past week.  Next week they need to go outside though.  As you can see, they’ve overstayed their welcome in the house.