I'd call this year a success. I think we made around 3.5 gallons of syrup in total. The evaporator helped a ton, making the process of boiling so much quicker. Last year we would have to evaporate basically all day every day, which still wasn't keeping up with the intake, but this year we were able to evaporate about 8 hours one day a week and deplete our entire stock pile from the week. The only thing was by the end I did use the stove top primarily everyday for 3 days because the sap was on the brink of spoiling coming out of the trees and I didn't trust it to make it all week before getting to it. So about the last 40 gallons were done on the stove top. Going back to last years process really made me appreciate what we had going this year.It was a good season but as usual I'm glad it's over. Not that collecting the sap got hard or tedious, but more that with the nice weather I'm excited to start working on other projects around the house now. I'm sure we'll have some minor adjustments for next season, probably add 15 taps to total 40, but all in all I think we have a pretty good system to stick to.
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| Cleanin' time Stored away until next season |
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| I kept a tally of our collections - 219 gallons of sap |
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| Interesting to see the color change as the season progresses - first batch (left) last batch (right) |
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