Friday was a FULL day of evaporating. We had already evaporated one batch of sap the week before (on February 14! The earliest ever!) and on this day we had another 60 gallons to evaporate. This spring is so wild. Honestly, we tapped our trees with a bit of disbelief that hibernation season is actually over. But the weather seemed to insist that it was time to tap.
This is our evaporator pan, and it has to be scrubbed out each time before we can begin. We also needed to gather sticks from the woods to feed the fire. Everyone is involved on evaporator day.
Ivar manned the evaporator the entire day. He’s holding up eight fingers because he was eight buckets in and we had 60 gallons to evaporate. With all conditions perfect, we can evaporate 6-7 gallons an hour. The rest of us gathered many a wheel barrow of sticks. The goal is to have a very hot fire feeding on little dry sticks all day. But some of our sticks weren’t totally dry slowing the process quite a bit.
The other goal is to not start out with big buckets of ice cubes! But this happens every so often. We would have been wise to bring these buckets inside the night before, but life is full of so many things to remember…
We kept gathering sticks from the woods, and Ivar fed the fire continually and skimmed the foam every so often. Now it was dinnertime (about 6pm) so we brought the cheesy lentil soup outside. There were rave reviews on the soup, and I realized I had the camping effect going for me- when food tastes incredible because you’re eating it outside, a little cold.
Rory and I went for our after dinner walk with a full moon and then we had family worship as close to the fire as we could- the temp was dropping quickly.
After worship, a certain delegation of us went to bed. But Rory and Ivar stayed in the sugar shack until eleven, and Rory stayed up to further evaporate on the stovetop until I woke up and smelled the sweet smell of candy coming from downstairs. I came down to check on him and saw the clock. Yowza. What a guy.
He wrapped the syrup in many towels and told me to turn it all back on (minus the towels…) when I woke up in the morning. Our goal was to get the pot to 219 degrees. I started it all up again at 6:30 and prepped the jars and lids while watching the thermometer.
We had it all bottled up by 8am. And the kids did their part of quality control.
It passed! I made baked oatmeal and together we enjoyed the sweet reward of a full day of work. We ended up with 16 pints, or two gallons of maple syrup. And we all agreed it was worth every minute…
Alden ate his breakfast fireside with locally tapped, hours fresh, pure maple syrup. Fancy!
