We are in the middle of our 3rd season now.  With a lull in the weather and pretty slippery conditions outside I thought I’d write a little update.

Slippery surfaces and below zero temperatures.

Our family dog Molson couldn’t get much closer to the fire if he tried.

A couple of weeks ago the forecast had me worried that it would be a very short season indeed, however such predictions have thankfully proven untrue.

I was given the great opportunity to feature my maple syrup at the Kinburn Easter Pancake Breakfast on March 19.  On top of that I held my own pancake breakfast for friends of mine on site.  What successes these events were!  In Kinburn I received compliments on the delicious flavor of the syrup and an appreciation in keeping with the traditional bucket collection of the practice.  Karen McCrimmon, our local MP stopped by as well, whom I had my picture taken with by a local reporter for the West Carleton Review.

We had a very good run of sap earlier in the week.  In fact, we hit capacity in terms of holding tank storage one day.  As a result, AJ and I had a full day of boiling.  Normally we start boiling in the late afternoon, after the temperature has warmed up for the sap to flow, and we’ve collected enough by the late afternoon to warrant it.  Not Wednesday though.  Wednesday we started boiling early in the day, kept the roaring fire hot with dry wood and managed to boil off over 500L of sap in our continuous flow evaporator.  We drew off 3 times which, for those of you who are wondering is A LOT!  Since we wanted to process as much sap as possible before it froze in the holding tank the next day, we set the drawn off syrup aside to be finished the next day and kept stoking the fire.  The syrup that we drew off was practically done, very little need for time in the finishing unit.  That batch was 27.5L; the clarity of that batch, and all the batches so far is excellent too.  I’ll update more later.  Right now it’s time to get back to work.