Tuesday February 18, 2020

Last night was a bit late. The guys came home (with tired dogs in tow)...at 1130pm. Every morning starts with excited dogs greeting you..this morning started with snoring dogs..the dogs and their humans were wiped out.







Quote of the day (by Melissa) "well this was a fun day!!" 


It was. One thousand fifty gallons of fun. 

In many, many years of collecting sap, we will remember this one fondly. 

This was a somewhat gray overcast day that felt cooler than the thermometers 43 degrees.

Bob and Evan made plans for the evening and Brad had school tonight so that cut into our work crew rather deeply. Therefore...the plan was to gather up the sap and let it sit until tomorrow. 

We were blessed once again to have great help from our friends and neighbors..Kevin, Jenny, Curtis, Bret, Melissa, Katie, Adam, Nancy, Kelsey and eventually Gerri helped gather our little run. We filled Walle three times!!

Brad helped with the first half or so...hard to keep track...but he had to get to school. We had a little accident with Walle last year.....and by we , we mean Kelsey...no front headlights...generally not an issue....tonight this was a problem...we replaced them with Curtis holding a flash light while riding on the back. It worked. 


When we drain the sap out of Walle, we have one pump that has several hoses/valves so we can run the sap to two different tanks/scenarios. 

Kelsey is watching the level up top, filled the top tank to within an inch of the top, bottom within 2 inches.




Had to face-time Brad to figure out the order of the valves, switches and timing. Poor Adam made one more trip to the woods to double check all this stuff at 9 pm.

Dark settles in quick in the woods.  The last pass was made with Melissa walking with a lantern down into the woods....for a bit along the wrong path :).....with Gerri driving Walle following her. This ended with Adam taking over the driving to make a tight turn and eventually find the full buckets we left behind. Bret was counting buckets exactly and frustrated as he could not find trees as described to him,    and was informed by Melissa and Kelsey that the number they shot him was only an estimate. Too dark to see eyes rolling. 

It took an embarassing amount of time for the group to figure out how much sap we had tonight..a banker, an ag salesman, someone who works with investments and has a degree in accounting and our newest MBA debated a long time til the banker summarized "a really lot". 

Thank you to Jack and Marsha and your dining room table for hosting us for chili and apples afterwords. Appreciated the warmth!

There was enthusiastic discussion about guest editors and contributing photographers...but these people all missed the publishing deadline ...so perhaps more pics tomorrow!




Sap Today: 1,050 gallons
Sap To date: 1,530 gallons
Syrup Today: 0
Syrup To Date: 8.5 gallons