#nh maple

Second Boil of 2015

So, I am playing a little catch up here with the blog.  The Shurflo Vacuum pump and main line did better than we had ever expected!  More to follow on that in a later post.

So jump back one weekend ago to Saturday the 28th.  We had another good run and since the weather was cooperating we brought the kids down to the tank to help us pump the sap out to the car.  As you can see there suited up…

Our First Boil of 2015

Well 16 mostly full buckets is how I started our first boil today.  I say mostly full because 5 gallons is almost at the very top.  I tend to keep them just below the outside lip which puts them in the neighborhood of 4 gallons.  So 64 gallons of sap that needs to be reduced to around 8 gallons or so of sweet.

We got started after lunch, hoping  for it to warm up a bit.  It did not…  I think it…

Shurflo 4048 Vacuum Pump Set-up

  This year we decided to help coerce mother nature a tad and force our Red Maples to run a little more consistently.  Having red maples our sap flow tends to be finicky and not every tree runs as consistently as it should.  So after doing some reading up last year we discovered that the Pro’s deal with this by putting all their trees under vacuum.  These vacuum systems are big bucks ($1,200+)…