My favorite season… Sugar Season!
Our newly arrived evaporator.
We’re back in full swing at the farm! We wrapped up last fall with some garlic and flower bulb plantings and tucked away the garden for winter. We had some downtime and got some farm maintenance projects knocked out and crop planning finished for the upcoming growing season, but now the maple trees are flowing and we’re back at it, in the woods daily running sap lines, drilling and tapping trees, and collecting sap.
It’s coffee break time in the sugar bush.
This year will be my third year producing maple syrup (read more about how I got started here) and with the help of a generous grant from Kentucky State University, we were able to bump up our production and tap over a hundred trees. Hopefully, this year will be a great maple season and we’ll crank out quite a bit of bottled maple syrup to share with you all!
It wasn’t until a few days before Christmas that I got the news I was awarded the grant for our maple syrup project - so I quickly placed the order for our evaporator to be built and shipped to us, as time was of the essence. Sugar season can run as long as 5 weeks or as short as 5 days; it’s purely up to mother nature.
Luckily, the evaporated arrived a little over a week ago, just as the sap was running. I’ll admit, when it first arrived and we got it all set up, I was quite intimidated. It’s a beast… shiny and new with fancy pans and gauges and valves, but once we fired it up and got it going, my anxiousness was replaced with excitement. This evaporator will save us so many man hours and loads of firewood!
Not only was it a race to get the evaporator all set up, but we had roughly 2,000 feet of tubing to run to collect all the sap, as these supplies were shipped with the evaporator. We had our challenges… this was our first time running long lateral lines down a steep hill, so that was a bit of a learning curve, couple that with the fact our double handed pliers (a tool needed for all the tubing connections) was on back order, we had a setback of a few days. Fortunately, we have great farm neighbors with some amazing tool making skills that helped fabricate exactly what we needed to get all those tap lines connected.
I’m still waiting to cook up a full batch of syrup. Last night we had a 16 degree low so our totes of sap and lines were frozen, but the forecast is looking a little bit warmer, so we’ll check again in the morning and hopefully, we’ll have everything thawed out and be back up and running.
