Even with the prolonged winter/spring this year, Kieran and I have not had the opportunity to do any helping with the maple syrup process.....until yesterday. Even Luke came along, his first time helping collect sap.
The process has changed some since last year when Kieran and I helped to set things up. Gone are the long tubes carrying sap downhill. Now the individual maple trees have a several gallon bag hanging from the tap.
Of course, some of the larger trees still have several taps drilled into their trunks, meaning there may be several bags hanging from the trees.
To get the sap from the bags down to the road requires buckets....and someone to carry those buckets.
Of course, once those buckets are filled with sap, it's too heavy for Luke to carry. Keep in mind there are a lot of bags to collect sap from....most of which you need to walk uphill to get to and then carry the fully loaded buckets downhill.
But the boys both had fun helping, out in the last remnants of snow (I hope) of the year, even though Luke tripped on a stick and landed face-first --- leaving a cut beneath his lower lip and another cut inside his mouth.
View the video if you like to see the fresh sap dripping from the tap. The sap was dripping directly onto the ground, we were too focused on getting the video to think about catching the sap in a bucket.
Back in the garage (or the 'sugar shack' outside) it's time to process the sap, meaning you have to boil the excess water off, leaving the syrup behind. Rough estimates are 40 gallons of sap equal 1 gallon of syrup. Yesterday we collected about 75 gallons of sap, bringing the season total to around 290 gallons.
For a another video showing how we collected the sap yesterday. It's not rocket science....
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