Start of sap boiling

Monday and Tuesday were beautiful days weather wise, lots of sunshine. Everyone was in a pretty good mood because of it.

Butternut and Wrambler

Buckwheat and Flavious

More and more Red Winged Blackbirds show up everyday in the yard...

We started boiling today, so of course it was raining. Monday afternoon we finished putting out our buckets, we now have 83 total taps and buckets out. Monday night at 8 PM while I was cooking dinner, Kevin went out to check on the buckets and had to collect most of the sap because the buckets were full. Yesterday we were gone all day with errands off the farm, so this morning we worked to get our tarp up over our evaporator so we could get boiling and catch up.

We got everything set up and filled the evaporator pan up with sap...

These are our storage containers for the sap

Pouring the sap into our pan

the preheater

 And then we lighted our first fire in our new evaporator! Which was very exciting for us.

The dogs came out to see what was going on and play for a little bit, but it's pretty damp and wet outside for them.

Once the sap in the pan got steaming, we sat down and had a cup of hot chocolate to celebrate (and warm up, it's so damp outside!)

Then we split a bunch of cedar to keep the fire going.

Who is that watching us? Oh It's Flavious way up on the hill...

We let him come down to the house for a visit and to see what we were up to...

Hi dad...

I'm not really sure what it is...

Hmmm this is interesting...

Hug from mom...

You have to skim the sap as it's boiling, like making jelly...

About 5:30 PM we went out to collect sap again from our buckets.

This is where we pour our buckets into, to carry them home...

Lots of full buckets!

This is what our trails look like right now

Back at home we pour them into different containers...

And then we go and collect more!

We have between 180-190 gallons of sap right now, so we have a lot of boiling to catch up on! It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. We ate our supper at 8:30 PM, and kept boiling till just after 9 and then quit for the night so we can get some sleep and start again in the morning.

Please visit our friends at farm friends Friday!