Well it has been a long time since I have posted something on the site.  I am back up north for the weekend and Mike and I have a lofty goal of running all the mainline in the large part of the bush. This is about 350 taps and from now on it will called section 1.

I had the misfortune of cutting open my finger after buying a new Remington knife. Beware, I’ll post the picture when I am not on devil Dial-up. It flipped open on the car ride from the Sault less than 20 minutes after I bought it. Not a great start but I am sure it will get better.

The first stop we made on the island was Keith Brown’s. We picked up the wire spooler and the mainline wire. He was nice enough to let us borrow a gripple tool, this was an amazing and time saving device. It helped us get all the wire up in less than two days.

We then had Bill Smith take a walk through the our bush. He took a look at our layout and our plans and said it looked good to him. He did however have some real concerns about our evaporator.  We have two really great stainless steel flat pans but there is no way that we will be able to keep up with 500 taps on a 2x 6 pan. We might have to pull back the number of taps we put in this year. It is either that or come up with $4500 for a new flue pan. We are keeping our eyes open for quality used stuff.

We have also made some major modifications to the sugar shack. We replace the rough log roof supports with regular 2×6. This allows us to cut off all the huge logs that run the width of the sugar shack.

Tomorrow we will do some more finishing touches to the sugar shack and put up the main line.  We really wanted to get blue line run in the bush but it was not possible to get it here on time, we had to settle for the black stuff that was in stock. There is nothing wrong with the product it just takes a bit more effort to clean.

That’s all, will post tomorrow.

Filed under: New Sugarbush, Sap to syrup bush ops, Start up
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I wanted to take this time to congragulate the new maple syurp website of Tig Tillinghast for his new web design.

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!

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Hey here are a few pics of the Sugar shack upgrades.

Enjoy

Mike

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I posted two videos a few day ago of mike and I running around in the bush marking trees and putting up main lines.

As I said I would here they are

Enjoy.

Marking Trees

Marking Main lines

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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

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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.

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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.

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A sugar bush in the fall has a beautiful odour of crisp leaves that have begun to fall to ground, the smell of the assorted trees mixing togeather to produce the seeds being sown for next years crop of young saplings. Combined, all create an amazing perfume that is indescribable and is something to behold. It is the feeling, it is the ora, the majesty and the favorite time of year of mine to be outdoors in what mother nature has worked to create for eons. It belongs to the annals of life. The bush comes alive with the stirings of creatures gathering food for their winter hardships to come.  Its is full of  the sound of mating rituals, arguing hiararchys, and the distant cries of migrating birds. The feel of the chill in the air of the northern winds send goose bumps up your arms and across your neck. The sight of wood stove smoke gently drifting across the canopy awash in brightly painted leaves, sparks an awe inspired smile on ones face. It takes on a new strata of meaning for one and all. Just being able to expirence it is one of the greatest things that my forefathers could proudly pass on to me, and I accept it with my own sense of wonder and respect. I love it ! Fall is to me the best times of my life. How humbling it is to see this magical transformation from the interior of the artisans studio.

Well in a few weeks David will be on my door step and the Vac shack will be renovated to facilitate the vacuum tank and pump. I am looking forward to this as Dave has not really got a chance to see what is going to happen in the bush side of operations yet. Fear not we will be ready for spring in the lines department. Its the evaporator side of things that has got me thinking. We have an old 2′X6′ arch and two 2′X6′ flat pans that my grandfather had set up from his years in the buisness. The trouble is he was retired had all the time in the world to boil and didn’t really worry about efficency. We on the other hand can’t run like this!  To add to my delema when I went to move the arch into the sugar shack the bottom and all the fire bricks fell out. I was bummed out but to tell the truth not too much because it was the first real hurtle I am faced with and it is easily fixed, Just requires some time. Anyway I have the parts I need coming and will have it operational in a few more days. The pans however are a problem. We only have flat pans which are used for the finishing of syrup. We need what is called a flue pan. Aflue pan has a series of small channels that the sap falls into in the bottom of the pan, and it protrudes into the fire below to increase the boiling surfaces and therefore increase efficency.  I priced one out and they’re not cheap. I also have been hunting for a used one and have had no luck so far. But we can still make syrup it will just take longer thats all. I plan to build a stand for one pan attach a couple of propane burners for our finishing pan. The other pan will be the evaporator. It will need a hood so I am going to talk to Keith Brown on what I could use for a temp hood and if I have to I will build one. So that is what has been happening around St JOE Gotta go.

Enjoy Mike

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Alright so I’m sitting here, procrastinating really, getting ready to write a business plan for our Sugarbush.

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.

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Do you wonder why maple syrup is so expensive? Well the reason that it’s so expensive is because a great deal of energy goes into making it. Below is a video that shows exactly how much wood it takes when you fire boiler. We fire one side of the boiler at the time this way there’s minimal heat loss.

we put about that much wood in the archway every 15-20 minutes, that means that we are firing the boiler every 7-10 minutes. This is of course depending on the different types of what and how dry it is. This year was a bit of a disaster as we ran out of wood and had to spend some of the time burning some not so dry popular.

Mike stumbled across a great website called http://www.woodheat.org This website is full of information in regards to firewood.  My favorite part of the website is the energy per air dried cord or in thousands of BTUs. This gives a list of the most efficient types of firewood to use.

I thought that the best wood to use was iron wood, I might have the wrong name for it though. As I can’t find it anywhere in Ontariotrees.com.  it’s very dense wood that doesn’t grow very large, it has kind of a flaky bark as he gets older.  Maybe somebody can help me.  The bark looks a bit like Black Ash when it’s older, but I don’t think that’s right.

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