The first person to email me back was Dave Lachance from lead inspector, he responded on the weekend with the following:

“hello dave,
thanks for the email and your inquiry.
the kits would be great to test the solder for lead.
regards,
dave lachance”

Not a huge response but it was a positive one, he also responded the quickest.

The second response was from Jennifer McIntyre from homax who simply emailed me back that they no longer carry this product.

Other than that I have not heard from anyone else. As it stands now I am ordering the Abotex lead inspector but I will continue to look for other ways to test for lead.

If anyone has information they think would be helpful please feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks Mike for that amazing post, I completely agree with everything. Thanks to everyone for helping us out as much as they did.

Thanks to our Mom’s most definitely for helping out with keeping us fed, Mike and I would forget to eat without you.

Also thanks to Bill Smith for saving us when Canada “stupid” Post messed up shipping our thermometer. The stuff that we did not ship express showed up on time, the priority package took an extra day, which happened to be on a friday, messing up the whole weekend. Without lending us your spare we would have had to rig something up that would have never worked as well, thanks again.

Thanks to Kieth Brown for all the great information he gave us from day one. It no doubt saved us a ton of time and money. Also thanks for giving us the idea to put the sugar shack in a place with 4 walls instead of a wood shed.

Thanks to all the other syrup producers on the island that gave us equipment and advise. Dave Stadnic, Chess Wallace, Don Mancher and Kris Desjardins just to name a few.

Thanks to everyone that was there when I was not. Cody,Spenser, John,Steph,Kurt and everyone that was there to help Mike out.

Thank you to Jesse for making the 8h trip north to work in the sugarbush for 3 days just to take a 10h bus red eye bus ride back. Also the logo is phenomenal, your dedication is amazing.

Also thanks to both of our Fathers. My Dad who made it possible to get all 130L of maple syrup back down south. Also thank you Roger for your calm intelligence and problem solving skills. We will most likely both be living longer from the stress you prevented.

Thank you to my Girlfriend who has had to deal with traveling and spliting tons of firewood.

I would also like to thank my business partner and friend Mike for the insane amount of enthusiasm, resourcefulness and hard work. You alway had a positive attitude even when I did not. It has been a real treat working in a sugarbush steeped in your families history.

I look forward for many more years of syrup production!

 I went through the log book and did a count on how much syrup we actually made, 130 Litres is my count. I think it is right on the money. 

We had quite the sound track this year as well. The sat radio came in handy. The 40′s 50′s 60′s 70′s and even the 80′s were some of  finger snapping melodies we were groving to. If singing to syrup as it boils makes it taste better then we should have the best. The firewood music was supplied by a fellow islander that I used to work with at Thompson’s Maple products, the band is called The BREAKMEN. A real treat and fast becoming favorite of mine. You can check them out at http://www.thebreakmen.com/ They are a folk/Blue grass group. Great music to keep the spirit up while slaving away at the mundane task of firewood.

For our first year we had a few minor problems with getting to know how everything is going to run. Most problems were due to being distracted by the thousand things going on around us. The vacuum pump flooded a few times, over filling the gravity tank was always a fun one when Dave was sitting beneath it, or flooding the pan over the float box,  and my favorite, forgetting to close the valve on the sap storage tank and getting excited watching the extractor pump over several times before realizing it haha. Oh well we needed to learn the hard way on some things I guess.

Dave and I would like to thank all of our friends and family that helped and supported us in this endeavor.  We couldn’t have done it with out you. Especially our Moms who couldn’t stand the thought of us starving ourselves, and brought wonderful meals on wheels.

Well in closing I must say I miss it already and can’t wait for next year, and I know Dave feels the same.  We plan on a few upgrades to the setup so stay tuned for some updates on our progress.

The memories layed down this year will last a life time.

Cheerio

Mike

I’ve also noticed that there is maple syrup in this  area that is certified organic. I don’t really know how to go about getting my maple syrup certified organic but I can say it was probably made more “organically” than any other type of syrup in the area (wood fired).

I have uploaded a picture of all of the stuff I brought back from St. Joseph Island. I also finished up the labels that I’m going to put on the maple syrup to drive people to the website so they can see exactly where this maple syrup comes from. I think this is a real selling feature to the product.

Mike and I go back a long way our first adventure together and commerce was our firewood business. My father had logged  are old property and the logger had left all the tops of the trees in the back of the Bush. After leaving all these tops four a year Mike and I collected an old truck, wood splitter, a chainsaw and a hell of a lot of work. It was one of the better working relationships I’ve had in my life.

We had a chance to walk the Sugarbush and made a rough estimate of about 800 taps in full  Bush. In the first year though I don’t believe we  will try to put in all the taps  for now we would be content with 400.  Some of the old equipment is still there like a beautiful  stainless steel boiling pans. It also helps that there’s power out there and a cornucopia of odds and ends that you’d don’t know you need until you need them.

Well are on our way for another adventure that’s for sure. At least now I’m going to have something to talk about on a regular basis on my blog. It’s incredible how much I’ve been lacking in the last little while I apologize to anyone who  has come here hoping to find new content.

I plan to be investing a little bit more time and effort into this website I know I always say that by this time I’m going to as I want to begin selling our beautiful woodfired maple syrup online.

Stay tuned for some more updates and check out my broken bone.

The scaphoid is broken

I figured I would go somewhere that is known for the Low Low prices and see how much they were selling it for.

Turns out that 250 ml of Amber sells for $6.37 and 375 ml sells for $8.17. So this give me a bit of a base to go on, I think.  I still have a number of other place to check out in the area but at least I can start doing some figuring. I still have to factor in how I am going to get all of this stuff down here.

On another note I received an email Thursday the 16th from a friend on the island. Turns out that time they were still making Light and extra light in most of the bushes last week. I can’t believe that the season is lasting so long, it’s pretty wild.
He was talking about putting together a small operation at his hunting camp next year. It sounds pretty cool to me but once you have a vacuum system it is hard to go back to collecting buckets again. Still it makes a lot of sense to put together a nice little operation like this, try to do something relatively on my own before I invest in a large bush. Of course everyone this year is thinking about expanding because of how amazing it has been.

Next year I hope to employ a few people from Toronto at Bill’s place, it might give me some time to work in more than one bush (I am sure that I am being very naive). Regardless I have started crunching some numbers to see if I can make this into a viable business. Lord knows there is a demand down here.

So I am back in Toronto and ready to head over to a buddies place for Easter Sunday supper. I had a bit of a problem at the airport as I loaded up my bag to much with syrup. The nice ladies at the check in said they would get rid of some of it for me. The one nice thing about syrup is that everyone wants it no matter where you go.

I was checking out one of my favorite design website when I came accross this picture.

It makes me think of all the time I spend screwing with firewood this year. Hopefully next year it won’t be an issues. I guess if you are going to make wood fired syrup than you have to split firewood.

I have been working to create a new theme for this site and I think it looks pretty good. Word press is a very powerful and helpful tool for web developers. I want to put a bit more work into this site to see if I can keep it going all year. I found this fun little picture in my travels in cyber space.

Someone was not thinking when they put this picture together!

I look forward to next year and being back on the island all over again.