Boalsburg Memorial Day Festival

For our 3rd year in a row we set up a booth at the Boalsburg Memorial Day Festival. The day starts with a 5k race (I have yet to compete) and continues with Civil War reenactments throughout the day. There are vendors selling a wide variety of hand made crafts, jewelry, pottery, leather goods and art. Our kids always enjoy the wagon rides through town and the petting zoo. They also have live music throughout the day and into the evening. My brother and his family live in town so we make a weekend of it and send the day on Sunday with his family. We plan on attending next year so if you live in the area mark your calander.

Low Impact Maple Production

With everyone going "green" lately we have decided to highlight some of the ways we produce maple syrup and at the same time use methods that are environmently friendly. By the way we have been doing these things for years.
1. We use tubing instead of buckets to reduce our activity in the woods. All our sap flows to one main collection point, we do not have to travel through the woods with tractors or ATV's causing root compaction. New research also shows that galvanized buckets contain lead which can leach into the sap and the final product.
2. We use scrap wood from local sawmills as firewood, rather than cutting down living trees. Also our evaporator has air injection for the most complete burn possible. The smoke you see rising from a fire is a result of incomplete combustion. The smoke contains carbon that can still be burned for heat. By forcing air into the firebox we burn those gases and maximize heat output. Our evaporator is also outfitted with a steam hood. The steam hood traps the steam from the boiling sap and is used to preheat incoming fresh sap (aprx. 40F) to 200F before it enters the evaporator pans.
3. We do not use any chemicals to clean our tubing. We use household vinegar which as you know is an acid. As it sits in the sap lines through summer and fall is slowly breaks down the residue on the tubing walls and is flushed out at the beginning of the next season.
4. We use reverse osmosis to remove 75% of the water in the raw sap before the boiling process. Less water in the sap means less boiling time and this means less fuel consumed.

These are just a few of the small things we do to achieve or goal of producing pure maple syrup but at the same time having respect for the surroundings we work with.