Good deal. I think the majority of folks are done over here, especially south of me. The trees are pushing buds asap.

Nice. Our weather turned too warm last week. We collected for three weeks and made about 12 gallons. Should have been 14 but we had some issues (first time using an evaporator and I knocked over a couple ro buckets). We should have started about two weeks earlier but I am a procrastinator.

Thats how it goes eh.

12 gallons is not too bad!

I don’t know much about making syrup, but that looks like a good flow!

I quit collecting down in southern NY a little more then a week ago . Warm spell and unstable weather predicted . I'm in the process of bottling it right now . I invested in a small RO system this year and can't believe how much time it saves . I make this stuff for personal use and have 7 gallons of finished syrup . People at work have been asking for some but even though Its way more than I could use in a year I'm telling them NO ! Not until I sit surrounded by all the finished bottles for a little while and stare at them like they're piles of money or fur !! LOL . I'll wind up saving about a gallon then giving the rest away to family and friends LOL

We quit last week and finished 48 gallons of syrup.

Do you finish and bottle it all?

Do you reuse any bottles, or get all new?

My buddy who I help every so often has been keeping barrels to either sell in bulk or bottle and finish as necessary.

RO saves a ton of time I hear.

Can't blame you VH60, making that much even with RO is a ton of work!!

That is great flow there Hutch...My red maples are starting to flower now and my bees are all over them...First large bloom of the season...

Wow, that is some real work there!!

Hutchy that little RO unit saves a ton of time and money . I don't have a wood fired evaporator yet . I use propane on a two burner Big Chief turkey fryer type grill . My local hardware store fills 20 gallon propane tanks for $9.99 so if I fill a couple tanks at a time and don't add up all the tanks when i'm done i don't have a stroke lol . That little RO unit turns 30 gallons of sap into 10 gallons of concentrate fairly quickly ( two times through the RO ) which cooks off pretty quick . I process what I collect in a day that day for the most part . The RO unit makes that possible . If I can't fully process that day at least I can concentrate the sap enough to store the concentrate in a large chest freezer .

Can you send a pic of your RO unit? My buddy just got one up in NY and he loves it.

We are getting lots of flies now and yes the buds are just starting. We have a real cold snap coming in a day or two and hope to have one more decent run of clean sap. We dumped out about 75-100 gallons of sap on Sunday that looked bad. Trees are getting fussy now. From Sunday to today we got about 1400 gallons of sap but we are now down to 1.8-2.2 sugar. Tomorrow we are going to pull taps on about 100 trees that did not run since Friday.
Where we take the sap plans to close on Saturday unless a big run comes after the cool spell. Talking down to 20 one of the nights. Less sap per tap and lower sugar content this year.

Bryce

Here ya go hellbender

We tried a RO this year but we didn't have a big enough pump so It didn't work.


We use new every year. The place we usually buy our plastic 1 quart jugs wasn't making any this year due to the covid deal. So we just used glass.

This the one he built, spent way to much cash on it but it worked really well...

We quit today! Sap total for the year was right at 8,000 gallons. Only made 15 gallons of syrup sold the rest to neighbor they just reached 2000 gallons of syrup for the season.

Here are some of the numbers that I noted this year for what we did.

It took us three and a half hours to make 10 gallons of ro at 7.4%. I can get it well over 10% but it takes a bit longer. Our sap comes in at 1.8%- 2.1%.

With the evaporator we would go through 6-7 gallons of ro an hour.

We used about 1/7 cord (our gator load) of wood and less than one 20 pound tank of propane to finish.

I don't want to get into what I have into all of this just to give maple syrup to family and friends. But it does give me something to do at this time of year.