Off dial up
Well I am back in Toronto and back on high speed internet.
This makes me very very happy indeed, but of course I miss the bush. There was a ton of stuff that we accomplished over the weekend I was up north. Once I got a chance to get to know the bush I understand a lot more about what Mike was talking about.
I think that we are in a great place right now because we have been laying everything out and planning things together. Every tree that we want to tap is marked with red or pink tape. Where we are going to run the main line is also marked with blue tape and leveled. Mike and I had a great time chatting about how we were going to run the lines and what trees we were going to tap and how. If we were ever going to kill each other that would have been the time but we came out of it smiling!
We shot lots of great video and took lots of great pictures. I will be posting them soon.
That’s all for now
Main line Plan
Well Mike and I have been incredibly busy the last few days, mostly clearing brush. Our plan is to eradicate every single balsam on the lot. We also finished layout the rest of the bush. We marked out our 500+ taps with taps with flagging tape, to good new is it was in a much smaller area than we though it was going to be.
This morning we are going to be marking out where our main lines are going to run. I am glad I am up here from this, it is really the foundation for a good bush.
We were chatting last night about how we were going to attach the main line cable to the trees. We don’t want to hurt them but we also don’t want to get too complicated. We agreed on strips of cedar from now as they are quick, cheep and simple. If there are any other ideas out there I would be happy to hear them.
Again it is difficult to deal with this dial up. To make matters worse the website is having trouble uploading pictures. Another thing on the list of things to fix up.
In the new Bush
First full day in the bush and Mike and I are stoked. Started off kind of bad as the plan we had come up with was rendered futile. We wanted to keep busy so bad that we ended up starting to work before we knew what to work on.
I leaned how to weld which was very helpful, tomorrow I will lean to use a cutting touch to undo everything. We needed to elevate the holding tanks to create a gravity feed to the evaporator because we needed to get the sap up higher than the evaporator. We welded brackets onto a huge trailer frame in order to hold two 400+ gallon tanks.
The first thing that we did was to move the intended vac shack to its new location. The shack was about 14’ by 14’ and was not easy to maneuver in a bush where the trees are 12’ apart. We were going to move it all the way to the other end of the yard and then pump the sap back to the camp in order to boil it. Good thing we did not move it all the way. When I am not on “devil dial up” I’ll upload some amusing video of the moving process.
Keith Brown was nice enough to come to our bush and inspect our prospective operation. He put us on the the right path on a lot of the issues in the bush. I am sure everyone has heard of the KISS principle before, we just needed a push in the right direction.
Now we are going to put the vacuum tank in the garage that we were going to use as our sugar shack in the next few years. He than suggested that we just boil in there as well…. you know “where the sap is”. Both mike and I felt a whole lot better after having him inspect everything. We both feel confidant that we are on the right path.
After Keith left we decided to mark all the trees that we wanted to tap in the bush. We marked them with flagging tape until it was too dark to tell the trees apart. The count so far was 268, I think we are going to hit 500 tap goal in a smaller area than we thought.
