10th Anniversay Trip

June 2nd my wife and I will celebrate ten years of marriage. After 6 babies (one of whom is in heaven), countless loads of laundry, birthday parties, homework and all the rest that goes with raising a family we decided this anniversary was going to be special. I'm not sure how we decided on California but I think it had something to do with a few days of below zero temperatures and over a foot of snow this January. Wherever we were going it was going to be warm and sunny, we were not disappointed. To fund the trip we cashed in points on a credit card and saved for a few months. We shipped our older four children to my parents house (3 month old Helena made the trip with us) and headed for the Pittsburgh airport. We spent two days in San Fransisco and 2 days at Yosemite national park. The photo is of the three of us at the top of Yosemite Falls, it took 4 hours of steep climbing to get there but the view from the top was breath taking. Helena was the youngest to reach the summit that day! In the hustle and bustle of daily life you can lose track of one another and sometimes it takes leaving it all behind, if only for a few days, to just enjoy being with the one you love. Sitting together on the plane, resting along the trial on our way to the falls or watching the sunset over Yosemite Valley, are the moments I will remember most. Not so much because of where I was going or what I was watching but because of who I was doing it with. One thing is for sure I'm not waiting 10 more years to fall in love again.

2011 Season Under Way

Despite a few set backs last week all four sugar bushes are on line and collecting sap. We finished tapping a few days ago and were waiting for some warmer weather to wake the trees up well today it was in the low 40's and the sap is a flow'n. My brother came in to set up the remote sap flow recording hardware but we are not getting a strong enough signal in the woods for the text messages to send. We are going to try moving the phone to a different location to see if that helps. We should be boiling in a day or two if all goes well. This first couple of days of the season is always hard on my nerves, so many things can go wrong. Once that first batch is in the jugs and everything is working I relax and start enjoying being a sugar maker again. No matter what happens Spring is right around the corner and that is always a cause for rejoicing.

Ready for a New Year

2011 is hear and we are excited about the upcoming syrup season. Since November we have been working in the woods updating our tubing system. During the 2010 syrup season we did a small test with Leader Evaporators new Check Valve taps and we recorded dramatic sap flow increases over the rest of our non check valve taps. The check valve keeps sap from back flowing into the tap hole during cooling cycles which prevents micro organism growth from sealing off the pores in the tap hole. We just finished installing 1500 check valves at our largest sugar bush.

Another really exciting project we are working on is device that will send hourly text messages with data from the woods (this year it will tell us temperature and sap volume). After this season's test run we plan to have it turn our vacuum pumps on and off, and measure vacuum. My brother is a researcher in Penn States Seismic Geology dept. (or something like that) He designs and builds equipment to collect field data from ice sheets and volcanic regions around the world (literally he has been to China, Hawaii, Greenland, Ecuador, Portugal and is making his 3rd trip to Antarctica in a few weeks).

Thanks for another sucsessful year and we look forward to hearing from you in 2011.

Joseph

Our Week at Jennings Environmental Center

For the past four years we have spent the third week of March at the Jennings Environmental Center's maple sugaring program. The center invites traditional schools, home schoolers and scout troops to sign up for a 1 hour maple sugaring crash course. The tour begins in the classroom where one of the rangers gives a talk about the biology, chemistry and physical make up of the beautiful maple tree. Students learn about the variety of maple species, how to identify a maple and what makes sap flow in trees. After the talk they go out on the maple trail and have first hand experience of tapping a tree and if the weather is right they see sap dripping into a bucket from a real sugar maple. Jennings has a small sugar bush and throughout the week have the evaporator boiling for the students to see and smell the sap boiling. After the last stop at the evaporator and a taste of the real thing (many of these students and adults think Mrs. Butterworths and Log Cabin is pure maple syrup) they can stop by our booth to purchase a variety of maple products. One of our best sellers in my wife's maple popcorn, and this year we made maple cotton candy (we made a few extra bags and are saving them for Easter). The staff at Jennings are very knowledgeable and provide seminars and classes throughout the year in on a variety of topics. One upcoming seminar thats sounds fun is about the benefits of bats and how to build your own bat house. As always we had a great year and plan to be back next year.

Is the season over?

Due to unseasonably warm weather (we have not had a night below freezing in over a week) we are wondering if the 2010 season could be over. Yesterday it was beautiful and 70F, great for cleaning up the yard and getting the garden ready but not ideal for maple syrup producers. The 7 day forecast is predicting cooler temperatures by mid week but now the question becomes are the tap holes sealing off? As the season goes on the trees begin to seal the holes we drilled in the tree at the end of February, the warmer the weather the faster that process happens. Our hope is they can hang on for another 10 days but we can only wait and see. If the season ended today our crop would be about half what we usually produce. As any farmer can tell you, much depends on circumstances that are out of our control so the best you can do is prepare and hope for the best.

2nd Week in Review

The second week of the 2010 maple season has been a bit of disappointment. The second week of March is typically the one of the biggest production weeks of the season (with only a 4 week harvest season every week counts). The temperatures shot right up into the mid 50's and by Thursday it was 63F. On the bright side our vacuum pumps have been working flawlessly and we have been collecting a slow but steady amount of sap. What does a vacuum pump do, you ask? The pressure differential between inside the tree and the outside atmosphere is what causes sap to flow from the roots up the trunk to the limbs and branches. When it freezes at night the pressure in the tree builds and when it warms up during the day the sap begins to flow. By using vacuum (we pull 22-23" inches) we create an area of low pressure around the tap hole and the tree continues to send sap to that area, which is then pulled into the collection tank. Because it has not been below freezing for over a week, without vacuum we would not be collecting any sap. This is exactly what we have found on the 700 trees we do not have on vacuum. We are hoping the taps hang in there through this next warm spell (it is supposed to be in the 50's until Saturday) because next week looks like better sap weather. On the brighter side my bother and his family made their annual trip home to help out for the maple season. They live outside State College PA, about 2 1/2 hours from us. We were able to cut and split some firewood and he hauled sap from on Saturday. Sunday before his and my father's birthday dinner we put new brakes on the truck. It never fails as soon as sugar season starts, my truck needs some kind of repair. The most costly was a new transmission in the middle of the 2008 season.

First Big Run of 2010 Season

The past few days have been great maple syrup weather. Daytime temperatures have been in the low 40's and below freezing at night. We had our first boil of the year on Saturday (3/6). Today we hauled about 4000 gallons of sap and I plan to get started early in the morning, we should make about 100 gallons of syrup. We found a leaking tank last Wednesday and spent the rest of the day finding replacement tanks (in the picture below you can see the stainless tank in the back round, that is the one we had to abandon for this season. In the other photo, we are pumping sap from the holding tank in the woods. Back at the sugarhouse someone snapped a picture of me playing sudoku. One of my favorite past times while boiling syrup. The last shot is of our kids on a giant snow ball we made two weekends ago. Despite the sunny weather the snowball is still as tall a Jude our oldest son.

Off to bed for a good nights rest!