We have been doing our own home-sugaring operation for 4 years now. Easter Sunday, April 20th, we stopped our maple sugaring operation for the year. What a strange year it's been for sugaring. This may just be our worst maple sugaring year yet.
Normally we put in our maple taps into our 6 maple trees in mid-February. The sap flows well with nighttime temperatures below freezing and daytime temperatures above freezing. Typically by early April we start to see warmer days (plus getting tired of boiling) and wrap up by the first week or so of the month.
This year we put in our taps by mid-February as usual. We had one good run and got a really good first batch of maple syrup. Then came another polar vortex which froze the sap in the buckets and sent the trees back into hibernation.
In March we had a couple decent days for sap runs, but we had a few batches that turned out dark and tasted really bad. We're not sure exactly why. Perhaps it was a storage issue, perhaps freezing and thawing sap while they still hung on the trees was enough to doom the batch, or maybe it was a problem with our low-tech boiling method. Regardless, we haven't made much good syrup this year.
Today the sap in the buckets looked cloudy so Dada of Ma'at dumped them out and pulled the taps out of the trees. The season is over, and it wasn't a particularly good one thanks to weird weather. Thankfully we have some syrup leftover from last years amazing production year.
Normally we put in our maple taps into our 6 maple trees in mid-February. The sap flows well with nighttime temperatures below freezing and daytime temperatures above freezing. Typically by early April we start to see warmer days (plus getting tired of boiling) and wrap up by the first week or so of the month.
This year we put in our taps by mid-February as usual. We had one good run and got a really good first batch of maple syrup. Then came another polar vortex which froze the sap in the buckets and sent the trees back into hibernation.
In March we had a couple decent days for sap runs, but we had a few batches that turned out dark and tasted really bad. We're not sure exactly why. Perhaps it was a storage issue, perhaps freezing and thawing sap while they still hung on the trees was enough to doom the batch, or maybe it was a problem with our low-tech boiling method. Regardless, we haven't made much good syrup this year.
Today the sap in the buckets looked cloudy so Dada of Ma'at dumped them out and pulled the taps out of the trees. The season is over, and it wasn't a particularly good one thanks to weird weather. Thankfully we have some syrup leftover from last years amazing production year.
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