Crunch Time

They say time flies when you’re having fun— that means prepping for syrup season must be a blast because before we know it, it’s here!

It’s been one of the better winters so far in anticipating the upcoming syrup season. The last few years have been too dry and we never really got a solid deep freeze.

And so far, we’ve gotten a little bit of both. And, if you believe the weather guys (we don’t 🙃) the next few weeks look like they’ll continue to participate in priming the trees for a good sap run (pending the right thaw—but that’s too much to talk about in this post).

Tree tapping time is when weather is consistently mid 30s but still freezing at night. Next week Tuesday might get some amateurs excited— but we’re not quite there.

Based on historical records (and trust me we have a LOT of the with Tom’s family making syrup here the last hundred years) and our personal trends— we tend to tap the last week of February (ish).

But before we can tap and even think about making syrup, we’ve got a LOT to do— and while four whole weeks may seem like a lot of time, when you work off the farm and are running around after two kids — those four weeks don’t stretch very far.

Today we made our annual rounds to 2 of our 3 supply houses. Because of product shortages (yay supply chain) and brand preferences (LaPierre) we visit multiple supply houses. We ended up at Sugar Bush Supplies in Mason and Mazurek Maple Supplies just outside of Lake Odessa.

We managed to load up about 200 cases of syrup bottles, 1000 feet of mainline, 1500 feet of line for laterals and drops, an additional 700 taps— and all of the small things (stickers, line ties, saddles, etc).

Thankfully we only had to head the hour and a half south and we’re able to skip heading an additional 2.5 hours north to Great Lakes Maple Supply (near Gaylord) because Dale made a trip out to our shack the other week to bring us our new bottler.

Some day in another post I’ll take you through our filtering and bottling evolution. While our last 15 gallon propane fueled filter tank/bottler (in one) was well loved and served us well, we have simply outgrown it.

This shiny piece of amazingness is a 41 gallon water jacketed (electric fueled) LaPierre bottling unit. It will not only hold all of the syrup from our finishing tanks (instead of us needing to recirculate it through the filter pump) but will also let me fill four bottles at once (as opposed to one). I’m sure I’ll make a massive mess more than once while getting used to it 😂😂 but it will help increase our efficiency. Speaking of increased efficiency….

Tom has our new LaPierre RO system all plumbed in and the electric nearly complete. All that’s left is for a friend, who happens to be an electrician, to come double check everything. I am incredibly intimidated by this machine— but once we get it down it will increase our sap concentration 4-5x which will decrease our wood consumption (we spend A LOT of hours chopping wood) and significantly decrease our boil times.

Which is what is allowing us to add 4-500 extra taps this year :) Time willing, of course.

In order to add taps, we need to upgrade and add lines.

Since we will be significantly increasing our total number of taps we need to upgrade a lot of our 1 inch mainline to 1 1/4” to handle the increased sap volume. We are also adding total amount of mainline, laterals and drops and all of this needs to be wired/lines and set up.

Which also means we need a bigger/stronger Vac and release system to handle the additional flow. Adding vac to our operation has been a game changer.

This was our previous vac—our new one is identical, just bigger :) So add to the to do list cleaning out the Vac Shack and getting the new system up and running.

In addition, our evaporator is currently in pieces and receiving a spa treatment.

We were blessed to find ourselves the proud owner of a (1991) 3x10 Leader Evaporator when we brought the farm (shack included) from Grandma and Grandpa Guiles.

At 30 years old, thanks to good care over the years, this evaporator is still a force to be reckoned with- and with our previous upgrades including a blower system, hood and pre-heater— gets us through 120-140 gallons of sap an hour.

But when you have a 2000 gallon sap flow day— I’ll leave it at that.

We are currently replacing the fire brick and ceramic insulation to increase efficiency as well as cleaning, sanding and painting/sealing the metal to help preserve it.

And those are just the “Big Thins”

The rest of our current “must do” list includes:

• Installing the toilet and sink into the newly built barn/shack bathroom (wahoo!!!)

• Moving shelving out of the main shack into the back work area to make room for the new bottling system.

• Finishing putting together said new bottling system.

• Finding storage space for all of the bottles we just picked up 🥴 Yes— we are already outgrowing the large additions we have put in the shack. • Getting everything ready for all of the baby animals (goat kids due starting the first week of March, piggy due to arrive mid March, and eggs currently in the incubator!)

• All of the things involved in getting ready for our veggie and flower gardens— we start thousands of plants every year in an indoor greenhouse set up— and of course all of this has to happen during syrup season.

And by the time we find ourselves getting through this absurd “to do” list, our favorite day of the year will be here, TAP DAY!!! (It’s the equivalent of a national holiday here).

Until Then,

❤️❤️❤️

PS.

As if there wasn’t enough going on around here I’ve been working diligently and using our other farm products including bees wax and goat milk to make handmade lip and body balms and soaps to be able to release and share with you all during syrup season!