Three Weeks in The Sugar House (or "What don't you understand about 'all the time, anytime'?")

By all accounts, this has been quite a maple sugaring season. I have no idea if it's "one for the record books" - I'll leave maple sugar producers to sort that out - but our backyard operation informants tell me they have barely paused over the past month. And with temperatures still fluctuating between below freezing at night and above freezing during the day, the sap is still running. I assume it stops at some point, even if the weather is favorable, and I'll let you know when that happens. But for now, because not everyone has the great good fortune to be embedded with a local backyard maple sugaring operation (or to be on their email list), I thought I'd try to capture the flavor (yes, pun intended) of this uniquely New England experience by sharing excerpts from the past three weeks of emails sent out by our local head "sapmeister." Our three weeks begins on February 13, about four days after the first trees were tapped and buckets hung:

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"?