Sugaring 2019
Tina Hartell
Sugaring 2019 Updates
April 16, 2019
Our final boil was last night, and the sap just gave up. We made nearly 1/3 of the syrup last night from the same amount of sap as the night before with what appeared to be the same sugar content. We spent much too long and burned much too much wood to make it worth it. But overall, the season was great! Despite the late start, it never really warmed up giving us solid sap runs through the whole season. Plus the sugar content it our sap stayed at 2.2% for most of the season which made a huge difference in how much syrup we made. We ended the season just shy of 900 gallons in total, boiling 21 times over the course of 32 days. A huge difference from last year where we boiled the same amount over twice the number of days (and made less syrup).
April 5, 2019
The trees are giving it up! Even on chilly, blustery days if the sun is shining, the sap is roaring down the mountain. We’ve been making a lot of syrup and the end is not in sight quite yet. This past week the nights have been cold - in the upper teens and low to mid twenties. That is changing as the nighttime temps are beginning to hover around freezing. We’ll see how far we can get.
March 26, 2019
The trees have opened up, and sap has finally started to flow. Yesterday was cold, just around 35F but with the strong sun, we collected about 1200 gallons of sap (or about 2/3 of our raw-sap collection tank). The sap is really sweet this year. We normally have a low sugar percentage -about 1.8% - but this year we’ve been consistently around 2.2%. This makes a big difference in the amount of syrup we make. At 1.8% sugar, we need 44 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. At 2.2% we only need 36 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. We can make 10 more gallons of syrup per full tank of raw sap. We also had a stunning 3% sugar in the open-grown maples from which we’ve hung some buckets. Our friends who sugar a couple towns over also have high-sugar content in their sap. The vacuum has helped us a lot during this late start to the season. Buckets are not filling quickly despite some warm days.
We’ve boiled five times and are just about at 25% of our crop. Starting tomorrow it looks like we’re going to get buried in sap! Hopefully we can get through a very-warm weekend and into a cooler next week.
March 18, 2019
By all accounts it’s been a late start to the sugaring season here in our corner of Vermont. The sap began to trickle in on March 12 but really didn’t start in earnest until March 14. Our sap tanks filled on both March 15 and 16, and we boiled both days. Now things have frozen up and it looks like we may not boil again until Wednesday or Thursday. This time last year we had already boiled 7-8 times and were digging out sap lines from under 5’ of March snow!