Collected 15 gallons of sap out of 25 buckets.  Roughly 4 of them had very little sap in them, while a few trees had well over a gallon.   15 gallons of sap from 25 buckets = 0.6 gallons of sap per bucket.   I’ve usually heard 1 gallon of sap per day per tree for 10 days tossed around in the maple syrup world, but that’s definitely not the case here.   Processing the sap now.  Plan on boiling tomorrow mid morning.  Looks like some neighbors want to come on by.  After that, I’ll tap the next 12 trees and have more than enough I hope.   Will be…

More buckets added and a reverse osmosis update.   To start off, I went to the local hardware store and picked up 6 more buckets – plastic this time.  I can’t stand their look but after putting them on, I like that they’re bigger and the lids are real nice.  Oversized and lock on real well.  They still look awful though.  Can’t get over that part.   Had to remove one aluminum bucket.  It had a crack in the bottom so the sap ran out.   I have 12 more buckets coming and ordered them from VT on Monday and they only shipped out today.  Probably won’t get them until…

I had a friend ask what kind of taps (aka spiles) that I’m using as they’re not the normal ones he’s seen in photos before.   For reference, a standard spile for hanging buckets looks like this:     I’ve found in the little time I’ve been using those that they were hard to seal up correctly and didn’t last long.  The thin aluminum (I’m assuming that’s what they’re made out of) bends far too easily, so even when you gently tapped it in, the top would bend and deform.  I’d see sap leak out around the tap most of the time too.   While I still have many of these…