[The Not-Very-Quaint Extractor]

Buckets and horses it ain’t. It’s a clever device, and useful in that you can calculate your sap flow by timing how frequently it extracts with its electric pump.

Tonight, visiting our rented sugar bush to see if I needed to turn off the vacuum system due to rapidly freezing conditions, I set down to first calculate the extracting times with a stopwatch.

I didn’t set this bush up. A man named Chaz did, and I came along to rent it from his family after he passed away a few years ago.

[The Sugarhouse at Chaz's Bush]

Our extractor throws about four gallons of sap at a time, so when we see it working every three minutes, we know that we’re running about 80 gallons per hour out of the forest, or about enough to make two gallons of maple syrup. The pump clicks on after 2 minutes, 56 seconds.

Just one test is often misleading, so I reset the watch to restart. Killing time, I start going through the trove of Chaz’s notes from years past. Manuals, sugar line layouts, some day-to-day notes. The notes are precious. They show how this bush’s trees interact with weather and temperature, seasons and how Chaz’s equipment – much of which I use – interacts with the sap to create light and dark maple syrup. He’s written down settings, mistakes, clever work-arounds and even occasionally how he felt.

3 minutes, 9 seconds later, I hear the extractor click the pump on. I could use another data point.

My sugaring buddy and I have been arguing back and forth about whether the season is over, or if we’re just in a dry patch for sap. I start rifling through Chaz’s notes to see when he stopped. He ended his seasons on April 14, 2, 21 and once on March 23, although the notes then indicate “burned the finish pan,” so I won’t count that one.

I hear the extractor pump turn on, so I push the lap button on the stopwatch. 3 minutes, 37 seconds that time, slowing a little.

Some of his notes are prosaic things only another maple syrup maker would find interesting, like the sugar content of his sap (high then as it is now, at about 2.5 percent), and others barely describe the drama I’m sure was involved (”March 20: Leak in flue pan”) which was probably very much like the day, almost exactly a year later, “9.5 inches of sap. Burned front pan.”

The extractor clicks on, and I push the lap button on the stopwatch. 4 minutes, 1 second this time.

In 2003, when Chaz was sick, there are blank spaces. You can see him backfilling dates with temperatures, and once writing on March 24 “Was in hospital since the 21rst.”

I didn’t see a lot of syrup quantity recorded day-to-day in that calendar. He’d put out a gallon of maple syrup one day, a few days later three gallons of maple syrup. The inconsistent boiling took a toll on the grade, with the maple syrup descending to Grade C on March 25. Chaz did a “push” the next day, putting plain water through the back of the pan to push through the remaining maple syrup before he would dump the pans, clean them and start over.

I notice the extractor has been going for a few seconds, so I reset the stopwatch. It was 4 minutes, 30 seconds. A whole lot slower now.

It took three days of boiling after that to get the sugar content back up in the pans, and the first batch of maple syrup must have been frustrating because it was Grade C again. It would have come back up after that, but the weather let Chaz down, turning cold enough to deny him sap for nine straight days, and allowing the sap he did have in his pans to sour. He cleaned again the day before the big runs on April 10 and 11, making a range of Dark Amber, B and then C again.

Those days and the three next brought Chaz 36 gallons of maple syrup, by far the most he’d ever made in such a period. The next day: “Very warm. I quit.” It was 76 degrees outside, a clear day and a night of a full moon.

5 minutes and 20 seconds had gone by. The extractor clicked on. I pocketed the timer and grabbed Chaz’s notes. There was truly a trove of useful information (that, for instance, the automatic draw off device I was contemplating using actually doesn’t work).

[Before Chaz, the Old Sugarhouse Up Atop the Hill]

I peer into the extractor’s input pane and can see that the sap lines must be freezing up. There’s little sap coming in, and the pressure gauge is steadily climbing as ice blocks major parts of the lines. I throw the switch on the wall with a satisfying “clunk,” turning off the vacuum. With some cold this evening, we’ll get some more flow tomorrow, and maybe extend our season one or two more days. It’s April 8, a full moon lights the outside; a fair time to think about stopping for those who would, but I going to decline. I still hold out hope for a last charge of sap in the face of the oncoming spring. We still have much to make up.

That column of water on the left is hitting the ceiling and showering down all over the vacuum room. I had the clever idea to test to see if I’d hooked up the correct plugs by flicking the sap extractor’s electronic trigger. Well, it worked to show me the plug was in the wrong place. Always good to have someone capturing the moment, too.

Today’s run was very, very small. Just enough for a nice shower. Trees are still deeply cold, although tomorrow’s predicted warm rain might change that.

Ellie and I patched up enough vacuum leaks out in the forest to get the Strafford bush up to about 20 bars of mercury. That’s about as high as I want to go. 30 bars of mercury is the vacuum of space. 21 bars of mercury is about where researchers have shown harm can be done to the maple trees (this, despite the fact that the maple equipment dealers insist that 24+ vacuum systems are harmless – they must just know it in their bones). 20 bars is just about right.

Here’s the scale to go by…

0-13 bars – Not much happens (although sufficient for sap ladder construction)

13-15 bars – You might see 125 percent the normal amount of sap

16-19 bars – You’d probably expect to get half again as much sap as you’d get without vacuum

20-21 bars – You might get 180 to 200 percent of the normal sap flow

22-24 bars – Maple equipment dealers get a warm fuzzy feeling. The trees show larger internal staining.

25-29 bars – Maple logs come screaming down your main lines

30 bars – You are in orbit, and you’re unlikely to be making maple syrup

Back in Thetford Center, I got the vacuum system up and going. It started off at 7 bars, which is par for the course. It’s always interesting to see where it’ll settle at first, once the ice melts for the first time in the year. I was able to patch lines (why in the world would a deer want to chew a sap line when my wife’s perfectly good apple saplings are right next to them?) and see the vacuum level rise to 10 bars before it got too late. We’ll get that forest up to 19 or 20 bars by sap time tomorrow. I don’t even want to calculate how far I’ve trudged in deep snow today with tens of pounds of tools on my back. When Spring flirts with us again tomorrow, bringing with her a bevy of sap, it’ll all be worth it.

[Installing a saddle (interface between lateral line and main line). Hopefully not creating a vacuum leak.]

Robert concluded that it was the saddles we’d put up throughout the bush, as the couple he checked down by the shack seemed to be leaking. He was despondent. I was despondent. Two months of work to fix the old leaky system, and we had a new leaky system. It was dark, and we didn’t have time to investigate or even start to fix.

I didn’t sleep well. Woke up around dawn and went up there to check it out for myself. Found that the saddles were holding pretty well. Found 5 major leaks – mostly your typical sorts of things, such as end caps that were never put in place, or a saddle that wasn’t hooked into its hole.

Came back down after a couple hours of work, and the vacuum was up to 16 bars of mercury when all five mainlines were open to the vacuum. When I shut off one in particular, the others went up over 18 bars, so I know I have some work to do on that one line. Must be a leak or two I missed. We’re going to have good vacuum this year, and that’ll bring in another 50-80 percent of the sap we’d get with just gravity. I am very, very relieved to know that all that work and expense will actually pay off.

In an hour or two, I’ll turn on the smaller vacuum at our smaller bush here in Thetford Center. Will likely see the same thing: terrible vacuum, until we go up into the woods and find what sort of crazy thing has happened to the line over the last ten months. Will actually be fun. I’ll bring the dogs and make a nice walk of it. This afternoon we should see our first sap flow, although I doubt we’ll get to boil today. Gives us an extra evening to prepare and clean the sugarhouse.