14”+ of snow so far and it still coming down strong

Decided to boil a bit after dinner. It turns out our little valley is a snow trap and I think we will eclipse 24″+ by the time this storm is done. The snow makes everything so picturesque and peaceful. Northern Vermont is so awesome in the winter!

Advertisement

More Snow.. Less Sugar..

With another Nor’easter bearing down New England we are expecting another 1-2′ of snow here in the Northern Green Mountains.

With this snow and all day temps below 32 degrees means no sap flow. So this weekend will have to be a ski weekend instead of a maple weekend. We are fortunate to be located just north of Stowe and a lil’ north-east of Smugglers Notch.

We hope everyone travels safe over the next few days and enjoys all this fresh snow.

Boiling has commenced.

We started boiling the sap tonight. With another winter storm approaching we needed to boil up the sap we collected the past couple days before we get the next dump of snow Wednesday -> Thursday.

The steam was starting to pour from the roof vents. I tried to capture it before the sun went down.

The evaporator was steaming strong once we got hot:

We got everything working smooth and we will probably be boiling again Thursday or Friday night.

Really happy with this new evaporator from CDL Maple Equipment. 🍁 🍁

We didn’t want to be bored..

We were thinking we didn’t have enough going on with two active toddlers, work and 100 trees tapped, so we tapped another 100 trees today. 🍁 🍁 The Garmin said I took 9900 steps & covered 4.9 miles installing fresh taps.

So now we need to collect and haul the sap from this location daily to the sugar shack. So glad we bought a small 4wd tractor last fall. We picked up more 55 gallon food grade barrels yesterday.

Hers a quick video of the other sugarbush.

Saps Flowing

People have asked what sap looks like or how much comes out of the tree?

Maple sap should look clear, just like water. The sap pictured below was just under 2% sugar content so to make 1 gallon of syrup we will need about 38 gallons of sap. Unfortunately at different times the sugar content will go down to 1.5% so we’ll need even more sap to make that same gallon of syrup.

Today was overcast and about 34deg so not optimal, but just warm enough to get some sap flowing.

Here’s a quick video from earlier today to see the sap flow.

Crazy weather..

Wow. It’s been crazy weather here today. We hit 68 degrees earlier and it turned our nice hardback driveway & road to the sugar shack into water pooling skating rink.

Good news is the sap is flowing and in the few hours this afternoon once the trees got sun we got 50-60 gallons of sap. All the sap we get in the next week will be disposed of as we finish sterilizing tanks and getting all the lines flushed.

Temps are cooling back down and weather will hopefully stabilize.