After scouting out more trees in the rain this past weekend, I woke up to look at the next 10 day forecast and it said maple tapping time was upon us in New Hampshire.
The next 10 days look near perfect aside from tomorrow which shouldn’t get above freezing during the day giving me one extra day to get my gear together and tap some more trees.
I put up 18 buckets today. I have 12 more coming and plenty of buckets for drop lines to get me up to my 40 taps that I was aiming for this season.
As you can see, the sap is running. Didn’t take a sugar content reading yet. Will probably wait until Wednesday night. Cold Tuesday, so no point in collecting, but will tap some more trees, and Wednesday afternoon collect my sap and fill up quite a bit of my 55 gallon drum (or so I’m hoping). Heck, 20 gallons would be a great start.
Tomorrow I’ll finish getting the RO (Reverse Osmosis) setup complete.
Meaning, I’ll move it to where I need it to be, run the last line attached to a dowel so I can put it and process the holding tank. Get it to run 3:1, time it, calculate completion time upon that math and then start boiling the next day.
This way I’ll have my current days collection of sap being processed while the prior days collection that was sent through the RO system will now be in my pan and boiling.
I have a finishing pan and unsure yet if I’m going to separate the finished maple syrup into smaller different colored batches or put it all together and blend it. I guess it really depends on how the first batch comes out. If it’s very fine, I’ll keep it separate… if it’s a darker grade, which it shouldn’t, but if it is, I’ll blend it all possibly.
So current starts are as follows:
Year: 2018
Start of Tap: 2/12/2018
# of Taps: 18
Sap Gallons Collected: 0
Maple Syrup Produced: 0
