Done!

We finished tapping today. Good thing, too. Everyone is about pooped. The snow was pretty rotten today. You went right down to the ground today. Got another loop we could tap, but I'd have to buy more spouts and everyone is about sick of breaking trail through knee deep snow. (smile) If my road building goes according to plans this summer I'll get another loop into passable condition and we can tap another 100-200 over what we are tapping now. That will get us in the general neighborhood of 1,000 taps. That is really stretching our ability to handle the sap with the help we now have. That's about all the trees we can tap, anyway, for the next ten years or so, until some of the younger trees come on line. Sure hope the season is long enough to make it worth the effort!

Reading the posts from those of you who do this... sure gives me a whole new appreciation for maple syrup.

Yeah Sweetfeet its hard work, but its fun and relaxing walking the woods. The steam off the evaporator smells real good to. On a cold day, next to the warm fire under the evap. pan is a welcoming place to stand.

Don, It is definately a good feeling when the last bucket is hung, but now the work and hrs spent boiling begins. As you well know, got to collect the sap from every bucket every day that it warms up enough to run, and then they all have to be taken down and washed and stored away for the next year.
The way the weather is looking we may hang another 200 buckets. Shapeing up to be a short season when it finally starts.
Loren

when visiting Vermont, we saw plastic tubing used to gather the sap. You don't use any? Why is that?

I can't answer for Don, but here our bush is on dead flat limestone bedrock, with no hillside to let gravity do it's thing. The bush covers 60A and a vacumn system is inpractical, and the saphouse is far off grid . On top of that New modern equipment is really expensive, so we are careing for our old antiquated equipment and makeing syrup the traditional way. Our family has made syrup for retail sales since 1920, and we have 4 generation working side by side, plus some very good lifelong friends and their kids that work with us. The comerodery makes the hard work fun.
Loren, the Acg.

We only have one maple tree on our place.

I think of being at the syrup every spring although its been almost 30 years since I worked at it. The family I worked for then did it as a tradition as much as anything. We had about 1000 taps and in the last few years we started using pipeline which helped the worst of the gathering as it was on very steep hills. We always looked forward to getting to the bush after a winter of doing only chore it seemed.Between having the evaporator fired by 7:00 am and milking cows it took "all hands" but it was great to be in the bush as spring came on.

(quoted from post at 20:02:34 03/15/15) when visiting Vermont, we saw plastic tubing used to gather the sap. You don't use any? Why is that?

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As I understand it, there's a lot of upkeep with tubing too. Some people leave it up year round and then tap a new hole in spring. Of course the falling limbs, animals, weather take their toll on the tubing. So they run around like mad men trying to get the tubing out from under whatever s fallen on it or broken it. I dunno, If you have zero I suppose it's worth it. If you have help, buckets seem to work.

We are all tapped, waiting for the weather.

Forty years ago, everything was on buckets, 2200 of them. By mid February Dad was turning away people who wanted to work sugaring. He used to hire two or three men full time, and several high school kid after school. In general we all enjoyed the work, it was a good way to finish winter and avoid cabin fever.

As the years passed, hired help became more expensive, and harder to find. We converted to tubing, first on the steepest nastiest terrain, then more or less over the whole place.

Dad passed away in 2000, and I was really scrambling to keep things going. In 2002 we got five feet of snow in March. No buckets were hung that year, by popular demand. "You think I'm dumb enough to wade through that "stuff" and carry pails?"

Two years later the only help I could find was one thief and one druggie. I declined their services, and cut back to only those taps that would run directly to the sugarhouse, so there was no time spent hauling sap. My sons were eight and ten that year, and the whole season was difficult. I had a couple of friends help me tap, and struggled through.

Since then, I have been getting one or another of my nephews for a couple weeks each year to help set up, and this year myolder son is home and unemployed, so it should go better. Unfortunately, I am not nineteen years old any more, and am having some health issues. Nothing that will actually affect working, but just require me to be away for appointments, most likely at critical times.

Switch to Sweet Sorghum better syrup and definitely
no snow when the cane needs to be cut(LOL)

I had buckets (bags actually). I now have about
1200 taps on gravity lines and about 250 bags. I
flush out the lines with water at the end of the
season. Only a half day to get the lines ready and
about an extra hour or two during tapping to fix
unseen squrel dammage. Never in my life would I go
back to individual bags again. I can do all of the
collecting myself in 4 to 5 hours. Including a half
mile haul to the evaporator.