Today Harold and I gathered the sap from all the trees we tapped the other day. We got about 140 gallons of sap today, enough for 3 1/2 gallons of finished syrup! It's a 40 to 1 ratio of sap to finished syrup, that is, it takes 40 gallons of sap boiled down to make one gallon of finished syrup. We usually put our syrup into pints, so that means today we gathered enough for 28 pints of finished syrup!
It takes a bit of energy to gather sap and empty bags, and we're not as young as we used to be! But we filled up our 55 gal sap drum almost 3 times today, and we haven't finished tapping all the trees we want to do. It takes us about 2 to 3 hours to gather up all the sap. At least the snow is gone, so that makes it easier to walk in the woods, although it's a bit muddy - boots are in order. Here's what the sap gathering looks like today. It was warm and sunny and 57 degrees out! Most of the bags were quite full of sap.
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| A close up of a very full sap bag! |
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| Two more very full sap bags on one tree!. The bags can hold almost 3 gallons, so right here is about 5 gallons of sap! | | |
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| The sugarbush looks a lot different now that the snow is gone. |
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| The bags are lifted off the screw hook and emptied into a 5 gallon food grade bucket. |
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| The 5 gallon buckets are emptied into a 55 gallon food grade drum attached to our Cub Lo-Boy tractor. We drive the tractor through the woods and gather sap bags on either side of the path. Harold takes one side and I take another. |
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| The sap drum is covered as we travel along in the woods. |
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| When the drum is full, we drive to the bulk tank to empty it. |
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| Harold and I have a bucket brigade to transfer the sap from the drum to the 300 gallon stainless steel bulk tank where we store all the sap. |
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| Today's 140 gallons of sap ready to boil up tomorrow. |
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| The tank is tarped for the night, to keep out leaves and debris. |
Tomorrow if the weather holds, we will boil up sap all day long. It takes 50 gallons of sap just to fill up the evaporator for boiling.
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