It's a good sunny day today, the sap is running and we have cranked up the furnace and evaporator and we are boiling maple sap as of noon! We will be boiling sap all day long and by this evening we should have the "near syrup" which we will store in large stainless steel stock pans to work with on Monday. But today we'll just be piling wood into the furnace, skimming off foam with a strainer, boiling away, and gathering more sap. We store the sap in the large stainless steel 250 gallon bulk tank to the left of the furnace. We tarp it at night to keep dirt and critters out. Before we put the sap into the evaporator, we strain it through a fine mesh strainer. All day long we will sit and watch things boil, drink plenty of coffee, eat cookies, and listen to the Canadian geese and Trumpeter Swans flying over. It's a wonderful life!!
I have tried to get these photos in the right order, but I seem to be having a problem today with this. But you'll get the idea. Harold made the furnace and the evaporator by himself a number of years ago.
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| This year we lined the furnace with firebrick tiles |
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| 2013 Maple Camp |
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| There's smoke in the stack! |
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Sap is boiling in the evaporator
A nice boil |
2 comments:
That is amazing! I tried to leave a couple of comments on some other posts, but they did not show up. I am reading your blog though and enjoying seeing what you guys do. Glad to see you guys didn't let a little snow stop you :).
Becky
Becky - For some reason the comments showed up as spam, but I hopefully fixed that.
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