Day 3-5 on the Farm

Day 3: Clean out the maple taps.

Maple sugar is made from boiling the water out of the sap. Every winter (usually January or February) a hole is drilled in each tree for the tap to be put in. Each tap is run to a main line leading down to a sugar shack creating a large spider web of tubes draping through the trees. From there, nature does its thing dripping sap flowing down through the tubes. When the barrels are full, someone must boil all the water out of the sap which takes hours...usually through the night. 40 gallons of sap will be boiled down to 1 gallon of syrup!!! When the boiling syrup reaches 219.4 degrees F it’s ready to be bottled up! Fast forwarding a few months brings us to Day 3: cleaning the maples taps, lines and shack. The taps need to be removed from the tree truck, flushed out with water, and plugged up until next year.

Day 4: Cleaning the sugar shack.

When boiling such huge amounts of syrup, you are bound to burn some at the bottom leaving the vessel a mess. Imagine burning rice to the bottom of a pan and then having to clean it without soaking it....multiply this by 1,000. It took 4 of us for a few hours scrubbing and scrubbing. Don’t worry, we’re strong that thing is sparkling!!!

Day 5: Transplanting blackberries.

I used to love transplanting flowers with my dad when I was a little girl...so fun. Transplanting blackberries...not fun. Those darn prickers!!! They were everywhere. Took us a few hours, but we transplanted about 20.

Knocking out the taps.

The Sugar Shack.

Cleaning.

Clean.

Kyle bottling the syrup.

The syrup.

Morgan finishing off the row of transplanted blackberry bushes.