Yesterday was an amazing day/evening in the sugarhouse as we produced 75 gallons of delicious maple syrup. We had approximately 3200 gallons of 2% sap to process from the last 2 days and thankfully the Reverse Osmosis machine concentrated the sap to 8%. Between firing the evaporator with wood every 10-15 minutes, watching the syrup thermometer for the correct temperature of 219 degrees, testing the sugar content for 66.9% (Brix), filtering the syrup through the filter press to remove sugar sand, grading and tasting the maple syrup, :-) and filling another barrel of syrup kept us busy all day long. Whew!!  But, this is what we look forward to each year and know the season can be short, but sweet!

Now, the important weather information. We had a low of 31 last night and the forecast today is a high of 48, becoming sunny. Tonight the low will be somewhere near 33 (probably lower in the woods and cool breeze off the lake) with sun and 65 on Friday! Crazy warm “April”weather in March! The sap should flow well this afternoon and even faster tomorrow.  That being said, one is wise to never predict sap flow - just be amazed by the awesome flow or lack of it.

For any of you science geeks who want to know more specifics on sap:gallon of sugar, here is some interesting info from the University of Vermont Procter Maple Research Center, where they know “all things maple”. Their website is fascinating if you are interested in anything related to maple trees, sap, research . . . http://www.uvm.edu/~pmrc/

   The Jones "Rule of 86" :

   The gist of the rule is that if one divides 86 by the sugar content of sap, you can           estimate the amount of sap required to produce a gallon of syrup. 

                  S=86/X andW=S-1 

 Where: S = the initial volume of sap (or concentrate) required to produce 1 gallon of syrup 

X = the starting sap (or concentrate) sugar concentration in °Brix.
W = the amount of water to be boiled off to produce 1 gallon of syrup

  Without delving too deeply into the chemistry of sugar solutions or the math, a much closer approximation of the amount of sap (or concentrate) needed to produce one gallon of syrup at a density 66.9°Brix, the formula needs to be slightly adjusted again.  (We concentrate our sap to 8%)

S = 88.2/X-0.32 and W = S-1

     °Brix     S (gal) 

       8.0     10.71   

 The last few days have been more like mid-late April and today we had a record high of 70, lots of sun and little wind.  It's nearly impossible to predict when the sap will flow and much to our surprise, it has flowed like crazy the past 3 days.  We have nearly 3200 gallons of sap to process through the Reverse Osmosis machine, and the sap continues to flow. We'll end up with about 800 gallons of concentrated sap to boil tonight and tomorrow into delicious maple syrup.

The soil is warming up, but we still have ice and some snow deep in the woods.  Temps will drop into the mid-30's tonight and get to "only" 45 tomorrow. Depending on cloud cover and wind, our sap flow might decrease. We've learned to never try and predict sap flow.

Much of our syrup from last year has been sold, but pints and half-pints are still available and should hold you until we bottle, if you need maple syrup ASAP.  Most likely, we'll bottle this year's syrup by the end of March and open up availability for all sizes.  There will be a slight price increase (we haven't done this in over 5 years), but the syrup will still be affordable.

Here is the forecast for the next 5 days:

  Extended Forecast for

Last week we spent a lot of time waiting for warmer weather to arrive.  There wasn't much work that we needed to do or even could do with prolonged cold weather.  Usually during the syrup making season, daily tasks include maintaining the sap collection lines and looking for leaks.  But this can only be done when the lines are thawed and sap is flowing, because we have to be able to see where air is getting into the lines.  We had only boiled a couple of times, so we didn't need to cut, split or stack any wood yet.  The sugar house was clean.  The tanks were clean.  There really wasn't much maple work to do.  We were optimistic that things were going to be good as soon as the temperatures got above freezing.  Yesterday we witnessed the fastest flows that we have ever seen in the sugarbush.  I don't think that we collected a record amount of total sap, but the rate that it was flowing into our lower tank in the middle of the afternoon was amazing.  Our vacuum releaser was emptying 4 gallons of sap every 1:30 to 1:45.  That means that we were collecting about 2.5 gallons of sap per minute!  Between 1:30 yesterday afternoon and 4:00 this morning, 1300 gallons of sap was collected.

The  10 day forecast looks a little bit too warm for great sap flows.  Our hope is that the meteorologists are just too optimistic and trying to boost ratings and readership with warm forecasts.  We need the freeze/thaw cycle to get really good sap flows.  Our forest is next to Whaletail Lake, so it does stay a little cooler than other areas until the ice melts off of the lake.  We are hoping that we can get a few more hard freezes in the next 10 days to keep the sap flowing.