Adirondack case guy
Well-known Member
The cousins got the maples tapped the end of last week. The cousins have a new gathering system this year. They bought a bunch of tubing and acquired a number of plastic totes. No more galvanized buckets. The food safety police are deeming them unhealthy after 75 years of wide spread use.
The very unusual warm weather this February has got the sap flowing, and it looks like the maple season is about 2 weeks ahead of time here.
So far the plastic tubing is working and has made gathering sap a one man job, but time will tell.
They pulled of an 8 gal batch of syrup while I was there for a while this afternoon.
If we get a hard 10 day freeze like last year, all bets are off in the whole collection system. My dad tried that system back in the late 60s with tubing and 55gal drums, and things froze up so there was no way to get any sap from the trees. With buckets, you can dump ice out of them and they can refill when the saps runs again. No way to dump ice out of those totes.
As you can see, this bush is dead level and no way to pipe the sap directly to the sugarhouse.
Loren
The very unusual warm weather this February has got the sap flowing, and it looks like the maple season is about 2 weeks ahead of time here.
So far the plastic tubing is working and has made gathering sap a one man job, but time will tell.
They pulled of an 8 gal batch of syrup while I was there for a while this afternoon.
If we get a hard 10 day freeze like last year, all bets are off in the whole collection system. My dad tried that system back in the late 60s with tubing and 55gal drums, and things froze up so there was no way to get any sap from the trees. With buckets, you can dump ice out of them and they can refill when the saps runs again. No way to dump ice out of those totes.
As you can see, this bush is dead level and no way to pipe the sap directly to the sugarhouse.
Loren
