Happy New Year! - January 2023

Good morning everyone! 
​I can’t believe another year has gone by already.  First of all, my apologies for not posting last year.  Let me fill you in.  Two years ago after much research we decided to add a vacuum system and mainline.  A major investment for us, in both time and finances, and research.  Thank you to the many maple farmers who helped me develop our system!  The fun began in November, with mapping out the mainline, and the slope.  Even though we are using vacuum to move sap, we are still reliant on the correct slope to help keep the nectar moving.

Finally in January, with the help of our friend Dick, we began cutting down trees to open up the mainline route.  Don’t panic, the trees that came down have been put to use in other ways.  Next, I had to start hanging lateral lines to connect the maple trees to the mainline.  Which of course is in the valley.  I also had to build a pump house and complete all the plumbing. 
 Finally, the end of February we got out and started tapping trees.  Due to time restraints we were only able to install about half the taps we had from the year before. 
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Let the season begin.  And it did start out late February, followed by a two week  freeze up during March break.  Once the freeze up broke, the maple ran!  And ran, and ran!  We were running back and forth from the storage tank in the pump house to the main sugar house transferring gallons of sap.  The new system had a couple of little hiccups, part of the learning curve.  But WOW!  We had more sap then ever before!  Boiling like a couple of madmen, we produced more syrup then ever, and on fewer taps. 

We finally got to the end of the season and things were slowing down.  We made the decision to shut the pump off, and finish what we had in storage.  Jennifer went out to collect the last from the buckets. Yes, we still hang some old school.  As she stopped by the pump house, she texted me, “You aren’t done yet!”  Even with the pump shut down, we had nearly 500 litres of sap in the pump house just from gravity.
​So we turned the pump back on.  My buddy James came over and spent the morning splitting more wood for us, and in the afternoon ran back and forth from the pumphouse to the sugar house transferring almost another 1600 litres of sap!  We spent another boiling until we were left with about 3 hours of firewood left.  We had to call it a season at that point. 
So, all said, my apologies for not keeping up with the blog, but we were a little busy last year.  But back in the saddle here and will be posting regularly again during the season.

Happy mapleing!
Michael