Sugar time

[Ed Thayer]

@mitchmaine 24838 wrote:

hey ed, buckets or tubing? looks like warm weather this week. noaa says 40 degrees on thursday, maybe. i think i’ll sort out the sugarhouse. bought a new arch and need to brick it in and ste up the stack. boil a little water in the pans to clean everything up. sure seems early but thats exactly what i said last year today.

best wishes and good sugaring, mitch

Mitch,

I have been working on tubing the last few days. We have about 350 taps on tubing and another 100 or so on buckets. I would prefer all buckets but with my kids out of the house I have lost my free labor and am forced to use some tubing.

Hope to tap some this weekend and get started. Sugar house is all cleaned out and all I need to do is set the smoke stack. I take it down every year so the water doesn’t run down the pipe and rot the back of the arch out.

I hope we see a better year and make some nice syrup.

Here are some pics of my little operation last year.

https://picasaweb.google.com/107396364480794542661/Sugaring2010#

[Scott G]

So for somebody like me, who doesn’t know a damn thing about tapping trees (syrup from pine, spruce, & fir probably is a no-go :rolleyes:), what is an arch??

[Ed Thayer]

Scott,

The arch is the structure that supports the evaporating pans and houses the firebox that creates the heat to evaporate the sap.

We call the whole assembly, the pans and arch, an evaporater.

Ed

[mitchmaine]

thanks ed for sharing your pictures. great operation. nice family. we finished bricking the arch today. fifty degrees out, do you beleive that? rain tomorrow and back into the deepfreeze for another week or two. hope tomorrows rain knocks somemore of this snow down. try and pack roads again tomorrow. ben says its sugaring in kentucky already, best of luck. anybody sugaring in conn. or mass. yet? try and watch the season come north to us. forewarned, forearmed.
scott, pine pitch is turpentine, isn’t it. you have the weather for sure out there. freezing nights and thawing day. do you have any kind of a maple out there? sugarmaple are the best along with blackmaple, but red or white will do. even a boxelder is in the maple family and will make sweet sap. a little thinner but makes syrup in the end.

best wishes, mitch

[Mark Cowdrey]

@highway 25033 wrote:

We call the whole assembly, the pans and arch, an evaporater.

Ed

Or, a “rig”, As in, “What do you have for a rig?”:D

Hope to get some of my lines that I take down each year back up tomorrow. Mitch, I think your right. Warm today but cold for a while yet before things really break loose.
Mark

[near horse]

In the west, “rigs” are pickup trucks. As in, “Which rig is yours, the Dodge or the Ford?”

[Scott G]

Thx Ed & Mitch. Tapping trees intrigues me as a forestry practice and I’ve never been exposed to it,…except on my pancakes 😀

Never have developed much of a taste for turpentine…

Mitch, boxelder, Acer negundo, aka “Manitoba maple”, is native out here and we have a lot of it, albeit most are multi-stem shrubby looking stuff. There are a lot of silver maple down in the urban corridor and some red maple and other assorted Acer species but they are all street trees.

I have a Grandma Moses print hanging by my bed of sugaring in New England. Its one of my favorite pics and is as close as I’ll probably get to the “sugaring scene” anytime in the near future…

Geoff, my “rig” is an old chevy flatbed and I “rig my rigging” in the trees.:D

[mitchmaine]

scott,
street trees are good ones. the crown and number of leaves is directly relaated to how much sap and sugar you end up with. find a street tree somewhere out of the way and tap it and see if it runs. and boil it down on your stove at home. forget the old tales about wallpper and try it.
around here, a rig is something you cobble up, or add too. like truck and trailer, or a set of sap pans you welded up youselves. the girlfriend can be a rig too, but not sure just what that means. try some sugaring and let us know how it goes.

mitch

[Jim Ostergard]

Mitch,
Probably wise is neither of us went into the, “rig” thing around girlfriends! And if you had just left the store after taking the last Moxie I might comment to one of our friends, “Now he’s a rig, ain’t he?”
Jim

[dominiquer60]

Bitter day today. We managed to take advantage of the last couple warm days and at least get all the tap lines up out of the crusty snow to a level where we can work on them. Dale stayed home from the market to fix lines and tap a little, but it ended up to cold to work on sap lines. So he started siding the last wall of the sap house, if we get doors on it by the time the sap is done we will feel like kings.

Around here we “rig” things together, like 3 metal gates and a couple metal fence posts to “rig” together a creep feeder for the calves, or “rig” an old license plate on the end of the corn picker shoot so ears stray in a direction that we want them to (more or less). Rigs can also be vehicle related, sometimes our neighbor Jerry drives by with a rigged rig:)

Erika

[mitchmaine]

lobstermen around here juryrig when they can’t do a proper job.
there is yacht style and fisherman style. thats how i remember it.

mitch
“old fishermen never die, they just smell like that”

[Ed Thayer]

Tapped about 250 on tubing Friday, Tried to get them done before the snow. Now have to get the buckets up and the smokestack on and should be ready to go.

Anyone local have any plastic drums they would like to sell for sap storage?

I need a couple.

ED

[LStone]

I don’t have any ed but these are in Milford
http://nh.craigslist.org/grd/2225973709.html

[Ed Thayer]

Well it has been a slow start but we have made 13 gallons of syrup in the last two days. I hope things continue and the weather does not warm too quickly. 🙂

Hope all is going well with the rest of you.

[mitchmaine]

Sweet. I can smell it from here. Not so lucky here, ed. Last week brought us 5-6” rain in two storms. Knocked down our three feet of snow, that was a good thing. But put it all in our brook separating the fields from our woodlot which wasn’t so good. Dropped two foot ice cakes on our bridge which really sucked, but I got across on them with a drill and spiles and tapped about half of it which ain’t so bad. Sap running pretty good but no way to catch it. Spent the day chopping up the ice cakes on the bridge. Got the horses in that far. So maybe tomorrow we can get some buckets in there. The neighbors with “roadside” taps aren’t doing that much. They Haven’t collected enough yet to fire up, so maybe we aren’t that far behind. Cross your fingers. We’re still trying.

[Author]

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