Tales from Sugarwood Farms

Thursday March 8, 2018

Winter is back. Snowing and blowing. The high temp today was about 35 degrees. If that.

Gerri checked the buckets in mid afternoon. There was a glaze on everything for sure, perhaps a few mm thick.

As Cody is making the effort to fly home for the weekend, we thought it would be nice if he got to boil some sap at least once. The weather forecast looks mighty cold for that to happen in the next few days. SO.....we decided to get what we had and bring it into the camp.

Dale drove Wally. Well started to...Wally was frozen in place for a bit. Bob and Dale got it out by chipping away at the ice on the rollers and a little help from the blow torch.

Meanwhile , there was very little sap in the south path due to the wind. Muff and Gerri walked on collecting slush. They made almost the whole loop before they got Wally moving.

Adam and Katie, our dear faithful friends, arrived to help with the rest of the woods, where most of the sap was at tonight. When we got done tonight, one of them, we don't recall which said "Well that was fun!" Two hours of fun later we had 150 gallons (plus 12) of slush. The process of separating ice and sap added some time and adventure to the process tonight. (We took it all back to the camp.)

It was really pretty in the woods tonight with the falling snow, warm in the middle of the woods and bitter cold on the outside. Muff commented she had so many clothes on she could hardly move.

What would an evening be without a crisis and tonight it was a frozen valve on the tank on Wally. When we got back to unload Dale discovered that. Bob got after it with the blow torch. Adam said there was quite a bit of slush in the bottom of the tank after we drained it.

Bob asked Katie and Gerri if they thought it would freeze into one big ice cube...Katie replied..."possible". Time will tell. We typically leave the ice in the bucket at the tree...but it looks like it could be a long time till we would need to get it and we could use some for preservative over night. We might wish we had one more piece of milking equipment. The agitator.

Giant maple sap slushie!