Donald Lehman
Well-known Member
Figured I'd start another post.
After settling my fathers estate a few years back, and finally knowing what I'd own and not own. We got back into the maple syrup thing after 40 years of not doing it. Pop boiled sap on an old flat pan out in the open with no building. All of that equipment is long deteriorated and had nothing left but 100 buckets and spouts. Happened unto a whole bunch of free plastic buckets, so that's what we use now. Have an old high school buddy who has an evaporator and he boils the sap for us. Since we are spending time and money just getting our woods roads up to snuff for another year at least, spending $10,000 to $15,000 for a used evaporator and arch, plus the expense of building a new sugar shanty and going to tubing, is an expense I am not in a position to take on. I do have a substantial number of trees on slopes where we could use tubing. Which we may do eventually. However, for the time being I have help and the whole idea of this little enterprise is to have a few kuggerands left at the end of the season to supplement my rather meager SS check, so I am trying to keep expenses down. Tubing users handle the stuff two ways generally. They either roll the tubing up every year and unroll it and tap each spring, or they leave the stuff up year-round and repair the weather and critter damage each spring. Either way, you still have to spend a certain amount of time crawling in the snow. Lol!
One problem with our leaving pipelines up, is that we also cut firewood in these woods and dropping trees onto the permanent lines would be a problem. Another problem with tubing is that you have to have some kind of transfer pump to load sap from the storage tanks in the woods to your gathering tanks. Our woods is scattered all over the farm, so it doesn't matter where we should build a boiling shanty, only a small portion of the tubing could be draining directly to the building. The pump is another expense and a piece of equipment that has to be drained every evening so it doesn't freeze and break.
Feel free to ask any other questions that come to mind.
Besides crawling around in the snow gives old guys like me some much needed exorcise, (and something to complain about to entertain all of my friends of YT). Lol! About the end of the day, we did have a pretty good snowball fight, so it's not all work! (smile)
After settling my fathers estate a few years back, and finally knowing what I'd own and not own. We got back into the maple syrup thing after 40 years of not doing it. Pop boiled sap on an old flat pan out in the open with no building. All of that equipment is long deteriorated and had nothing left but 100 buckets and spouts. Happened unto a whole bunch of free plastic buckets, so that's what we use now. Have an old high school buddy who has an evaporator and he boils the sap for us. Since we are spending time and money just getting our woods roads up to snuff for another year at least, spending $10,000 to $15,000 for a used evaporator and arch, plus the expense of building a new sugar shanty and going to tubing, is an expense I am not in a position to take on. I do have a substantial number of trees on slopes where we could use tubing. Which we may do eventually. However, for the time being I have help and the whole idea of this little enterprise is to have a few kuggerands left at the end of the season to supplement my rather meager SS check, so I am trying to keep expenses down. Tubing users handle the stuff two ways generally. They either roll the tubing up every year and unroll it and tap each spring, or they leave the stuff up year-round and repair the weather and critter damage each spring. Either way, you still have to spend a certain amount of time crawling in the snow. Lol!
One problem with our leaving pipelines up, is that we also cut firewood in these woods and dropping trees onto the permanent lines would be a problem. Another problem with tubing is that you have to have some kind of transfer pump to load sap from the storage tanks in the woods to your gathering tanks. Our woods is scattered all over the farm, so it doesn't matter where we should build a boiling shanty, only a small portion of the tubing could be draining directly to the building. The pump is another expense and a piece of equipment that has to be drained every evening so it doesn't freeze and break.
Feel free to ask any other questions that come to mind.
Besides crawling around in the snow gives old guys like me some much needed exorcise, (and something to complain about to entertain all of my friends of YT). Lol! About the end of the day, we did have a pretty good snowball fight, so it's not all work! (smile)
