With firewood done for the year and the setup in hibernation, Dave and I have been relaxing as much as the off season allows.  But it won’t last long. We have acquired some things to upgrade the operation.  There should be some interesting posts coming up. 

Enjoy

Mike

 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

Happy syrup making to everyone. We are indeed making maple syrup this year! Our first batch that was pulled of turned out to be about 20L, not bad for about 3 days work. I have been pretty sick after getting back from the Island and when I finally was feeling better I had to get back to work in a big way.

I did get a chance to upload a few videos on to youtube before I started feeling under the weather. I think this particular video captures the essence of what maple syrup production is like, well at least when things start to break. Mike and I have been bumbling around with some of the new equipment as we can’t really test anything until the sap started to flow.

Here is a quick little video of what happens to an extractor pump when you put to much oil in it.

Enjoy!

The site looks amazing and is much easier to navigate, really an amazing job.

Tig has some really great stories and ideas on his website which is why he is number one on my blog roll. I love his last idea of putting maple syrup in kegs, I really hope he figures it out.

Love the new URL and the site design Tig, keep on boiling!

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.

There’s been a lot of stuff happening in recent days. Mike and Steph (Mike’s fiancee) have successfully cut split and piled 15 cords and wood which will be our fuel this year. This is a definite load off my mind. Mike keeps me really well-informed but I still feel a little apprehensive as I haven’t seen anything, Mike still is not taking any pictures. (I think he wants it to be a surprise)

I have the daunting task to write the entire business plan for the Sugarbush. This is going to help us organize everything that we need in order to push forward. It’s also going to solidify the plane both Mike and I have.

It still doesn’t mean that I am going to enjoy this, I’m written business plans before and boy do they ever take a lot of effort, but I guess that’s why they’re worth it.

alright I’ve killed enough time doing this.

Lyrics Download.