Another decent day

We collected 485 gallons in the woods, and then expect another 100 at home.  585 total. Not bad! We just keep cooking!

The trees like Sundays.....

Our biggest day yet this season.  Collected 1000 gallons of sap today. It was beautiful in the woods! We'll be cooking tonight and most likely tomorrow during the day also.

Cooking Saturday night

Our little messenger from the woods just let us know there's alot of sap to collect.  We'll be cooking tonight again!!  Here's how fast the trees are running :)

Cooking tonight

Even if we end-up with a small collecting day, we saved enough sap from yesterday to be cooking at the Shak tonight.

The Shak's in Action

We collected 450 gallons today, so we're cooking at the Shak tonight!

FULL day

We left the woods today with all rigs full (660 gallons), and had to leave one trail uncollected.  Back at home, we'll collect another 100+ gallons.  Definitely steam rolling from the Shak tonight.

Our season has officially begun

We collected 550 gallons on Monday, our first significant collecting day this year!  So yes, the trees LUV snow.  We brought-in about 150 gallons yesterday (Tuesday), and expect a BIG day today with the snow that fell last night.  We'll be cooking at the Shak tonight, Wednesday.

We celebrate Spring snowstorms

I KNOW most are ready for Spring weather, but we CELEBRATE Spring snowstorms!  The change in barometric pressure ahead of the storm makes the trees run crazy!  We checked the trees at about 2 this afternoon, and they were dripping crazy.  We could tell they had just begun dripping because there was frozen sap in the bottom of the pails.  So.......tomorrow (Monday) may be a very big collecting day!  It's more fun when this happens on the weekend, but we'll take it any time :)

Abbreviated cooking

We collected what was available in the woods yesterday (maybe 250 gallons?) and cooked at the Shak in an abbreviated style, using only the front pan.  We'll most likely be doing the same tonight, Sat, 3/21.  We're still hopeful a BIG season is on it's way!

The woods are cold yet....

Still waiting.  After checking buckets, there's probably 100-200 gallons to collect today.  We're going to leave it out there and collect tomorrow.  Kevin was on a job yesterday where there was 5' of frost in the ground yet.  So we're pretty sure the woods is still in winter mode.  Soon!

This week's forecast

This week's forecast looks like a good one to get the trees started.

No cooking in the Shak yet this year.  Hopefully by this weekend we'll see some action.

Small run

We could collect just enough today to get our pan started cooking, but we're going to bring our sap to a syrup friend of ours who purchased a new pan this year and is super anxious to try it for the first time. No action at the Sugar Shak yet.

It froze last night!

The predicted low was 39, but it got down to 30 last night.  Yes!  We may have our first collecting day of the season.

Beautifully warm, but they're not running

Man it feels great outside!  BUT.....the trees are not running.  We need some good cold nights again.  Looks like next week's forecast may be in our favor.  Please check back.

Welcome to 2015!

We've officially kicked-off our '2015 Syrup Season.'  The biggest thing is our 700+ trees are tapped!!  We have some other prep work to do before we're actually ready to fire-up the stove, but we're getting close.  Some trees have run 'a little,' but nothing big yet.  The next few nights look to be too warm for anything to happen, but the forecast for next week looks awesome.  Reminder:  Ideal weather is .....FREEZING nights with temps climbing to 45 by noon. Stay tuned.