We’ve been pretty busy in the past few weeks, running lines, tapping and moving equipment to the Strafford sugar shack. That’s where we’ll be making most of the maple syrup this year, rather than in our Thetford Center shack. We’ve grown to the extent that we need the extra capacity.

Today we had our annual Town Meeting here in Thetford. Road Foreman? Off sugaring. Fire Chief? Ditto. I should have been too. The weather wasn’t the greatest for it (not cold enough these last few nights), but it sure would have helped to make up for some lost time. Now that the budget’s passed, we can get serious.

Last year we managed to burn about a dozen cord of wood in the process of making 520 gallons of maple syrup. We’ll have a total between 30 and 40 cord by the time we’re done. Might be enough for two years, then again, maybe we’ll get some folks sending us some additional sap.

I’ll be heading up to Vershire tomorrow morning to pick up some old tin roofing a friend is setting aside as he takes down a falling farmhouse on his woodlot. Will be sure to stock him up with a good amount of maple syrup. This tin will go atop the split and stacked wood. It’s just about the best thing to help dry it out. The wood starts off about 40 percent water when it’s split. By the time it’s dry enough for my tastes, it’s gone down to between 15 and 17 percent water – about as low as wood can go in Vermont’s outdoor air. We had a doohickey with long prongs you could stick in the end of a log to tell its moisture level. It was sitting out until a friend’s twin boys came by and started to try to test each other’s moisture levels. Turns out they’re both about 85 percent water incidentally, which makes sense, as they’re twins.

In retrospect, the number of gallons of maple syrup we made last year relative to the wood we burned indicates that our pre-concentration of the sap isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be. Suggests we’re concentrating the maple sugar in that fluid only between 2 and 3 times. We’d much rather see between 5 and 6 times concentration, as that’s where we’ve been able to show consistently that the flavor remains the same after going through our reverse osmosis machine. Just for the sake of argument, if we did concentrate by 6x, then the wood we have on hand could make more than 4,000 gallons of maple syrup, if you could find the sap. That gets the mind going.

[Glug glug glug. Maple syrup it ain't.]

One friend opted to welcome the drizzle, turning his head up, opening his mouth to take a swig of the falling sap, in hopes of quenching his thirst. This is the last picture I got that stayed in focus, as after he started gagging, I started rolling around laughing. He didn’t realize how much sawdust was going to come down with that sap.

You might note in that picture the funny Coke can antennae hanging from the rafters as well. I put those up there in order to make people avoid clocking their heads on the I-beam we installed there, running outside. We have a small trolley system that can run large barrels of maple syrup or pallets of wood in and out of the sugarhouse. I’ll put up more pictures of that system, but suffice it to say for now that the ugly Coke can strategy has worked pretty well. We’ve had that I-beam at eye-level for a couple weeks, and no one has beaned themselves, which is just short of miraculous.

We broke the 500 gallons of maple syrup mark yesterday in what was probably our second-to-last boil. Today we’re collecting sap, along with more tomorrow, and that’ll very likely be the last boil of 2009. My wife will be very, very pleased about that, but I could stand to have it run a few more weeks. There’s always next year.

[Visitors can't help themselves]

We didn’t make much maple syrup. The wind knocked down the sap flow in the second half of the day. We took in about 600 gallons of new sap, putting most of that sugar into the pans, and not drawing off much – perhaps three gallons of maple syrup. Once this arch starts rollicking along, it’ll be throwing about 10 gallons of maple syrup per hour of maple syrup.

To get that to happen, we need our reverse osmosis machine working, and that’s been a bit of a chore. Ours, you see, is about as old as I am, and a lot crankier. Today it exhibited three distinct personalities, behaving very differently with the same control settings. I think we’re past a plumber, and we need either a psychologist or an exorcist. But it wouldn’t be maple syruping if we weren’t breaking something expensive.

[The installation this week of the decidedly low-tech "new" stack]

Very few of them came with directions. The couple manuals that did come with them. turned out to be written in French. Even after translating them, they weren’t very helpful. But that’s sugaring. Part of the fun is the fiddling with the equipment to make it all work together efficiently, causing all sorts of opportunities for arguments and mayhem.

It kept us in the shack more than we should have been and spending less time out in the woods. I’m looking forward to this coming boiling season to get out into the sugarbush a little more often, checking lines and spending less time with wrenches and duct tape.

This past week we had a couple warm days, including a beautiful 40-degree run overnight with mist and rain that must have had the sugar maple trees ready to pop with sap. We and most others were caught out unready to tap (still are), and now it’s cold again. I’m betting on this coming weekend, after Valentine’s Day to tap out. We should be ready by then, even though we still have lots of line work to do.

As far as new technologies we’re introducing in 2009, we have a short list. We’ll have steam hoods this year, which isn’t that big a deal. They came with the used evaporator we bought. This directs the steam out the ports in the roof. We may also introduce automatic draw-off, which is a clever device that senses the temperature of the fluid in the sugar pan and opens up a valve only when it reaches the boiling temperature of maple syrup. This will free up an extra hand in the sugar house, although it does involve a lot of fiddly settings and is yet another thing that could go awry. I broached the topic with the guys, and they all furrowed their brows.

Other than that, our priority has been redoing many of the older lines we use, so that we can get much more sap this year to feed the larger evaporator. We completely re-did our bush in Strafford, expanding it to about 1050 taps, and just this past week started running line to an additional 200 trees here in Thetford, making for a combined total of about 1,600. With good vacuum and a good sap year, this might provide as much as 700 gallons of maple syrup, doubling or tripling our production from last year.