Wednesday, February
13
Seven of us gathered
sap today and hung 19 more buckets.
Thursday, February
14
Drip, Drip, Drip, Gush!
Friday, February
15
We will definitely be
tapping 20 to 30 more trees and getting more firewood in.
Saturday, February
16
We will get more sap
tomorrow. Then none for a few days while temperatures plummet.
Monday, February
18
Cold and windy today. No
sap run, of course. The buckets have from almost nothing to ¾" of sap
frozen solid in them.
Tuesday, February
19
We have 118 buckets to
visit. Come help if you can.
Friday, February
22
Last Tuesday we
collected 24 gallons of sap and threw out a lot of ice. The ice is almost all
water. Almost all of the maple sugar is left behind in the liquid. We save a
lot of firewood by throwing out the ice. If we put it in the evaporator we
would not only have to heat it up and convert the liquid water to steam, we
would also have to convert the ice to liquid water. The latter takes 80 calories
of heat per cubic centimeter of water compared to 1 calorie of heat per cubic
centimeter of water to raise the temperature of water 1 deg. C. Melting ice
takes a lot of firewood. I think I once calculated that it takes about 10% more
firewood to get syrup from ice sap than from liquid sap.
Saturday, February
23
This is promising to
be a really good season. Fantastic sugarin' weather so far, and more predicted.
Sunday, February
24
Prepare for MUD . . . . A good bit what happens in The Sugar
House is several people sitting around watching others work. Don't hesitate to
come just for the warmth of the fire and the smell of boiling syrup.
Monday, February
25 (morning)
Low last night was 28
deg. F. High today predicted to be 41 deg. F, then down to 22 and back up to 42
Tuesday. I keep pinching myself to be sure I'm not dreaming. This could hardly
be better. Yesterday we got almost all of the syrup from our first 420 gallons
of sap canned.
Monday, February
25 (night)
We collected a
whopping 122 gallons of sap from 122 buckets. Yup, exactly one gallon per
bucket.
Tuesday, February
26
We collected a
whopping 129 gallons of sap from 126 buckets. That's even more than the one
gallon per bucket we got yesterday. Another really good run. Last night, like
the night before, the sap kept dripping until the temperature dropped below
freezing, then started dripping again this morning when the temperature rose
above freezing. That was a long time dripping, even more so than last night
because the temperature was below freezing only for a short time. In fact, I
thought it probably wasn't a cold enough night to produce a good sap flow today.
Wrong!
Wednesday, February
27
It's raining, light
but steady. Mud everywhere. We even have puddles in The Sugar House.
Thursday, February
28 (morning)
Little dripping in the
sugarbush. We need a cold night. Maybe that will be Friday night according to
the weatherman. . . . It did run some before the lack of cold nights had their
insidious effect.
Thursday, February
28 (evening)
- 1:30 p.m. to whenever:
- Wash the filters that we used yesterday
- Inventory syrup
- Wash and store jars of syrup that we canned
yesterday
- Can the remainder of the syrup that we have on
hand
- Wash stuff, stuff and more stuff
- Split wood and bring it in
3:30 p.m. to whenever but not later than 5:30-6:00 p.m.
- COLLECT SAP (highest priority)
- Split wood and bring it in
Friday, March 1
I'm using a lot of
exclamation marks this year. The season deserves it so far.
Sunday, March 3
(12:56 AM)
The hot dogs cooked in
maple syrup were very good today (Saturday). . . . I’ll restart the boil
tomorrow (Sunday) morning early and keep it going until about noon. I'll also
build a platform around the sap barrels. The mud is getting quite annoying.
Monday, March 4 (afternoon)
Our total to date is
21.7 gallons of syrup from 935 gallons of sap (43:1). We don't know what to make of the Batch #3
ratio of 36, then the Batch #4 ratio of 57.
That's what our records show. ??
Monday, March 4 (evening)
Did it get cold enough
last night? YES
Will it get warm
enough today? YES
Will we have sunshine?
Not much, but it didn't seem to matter.
And what don't you understand about "all the time, anytime"?
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