2015 Maple syrup

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Published: Thursday, 09 April 2015 23:45

Written by David DeCiero

The maple syrup experiment is going well.  I ended up putting in 23 taps.  Since the majority of trees are large, most of them had multiple taps.  This allowed me to cut down on the number of buckets I needed.  The weather wasn’t really cooperative this year in March, as it stayed extremely cold, with most days never getting above freezing.  This caused for a reduced sap flow and some trees gave up very little.  The final tally was 180 gallons of sap, which boiled down to 6 1/8  gallons of syrup.  This wasn’t a bad haul for the first year doing it and in a year that was generally regarded as poor.  We definitely learned quite a bit and are fully prepared for next year when we will most likely be closer to 50 taps (all gravity fed).  That should allow us to make full use of the evaporator that we built.  The only thing left to do is clean all of the equipment with bleach (not the pan as bleach will pit stainless steel) and store it until next season.