Tapping Complete!

We finally finished up tapping all 26,250 maple trees, and we have even boiled a couple times making about 8 barrels thus far.  This season has been a challenge to say the least as we had 5 people lined up to tap every day, however one quit about 2 hours before we started on day one and another was not able to take the physical nature of the job and only worked a couple days a week.  That left my dad, myself, and Matt, our dedicated woods guy who's is an expert in the woods.  We did get some much needed help form a couple good friends Mike, Eric, and my uncle Eric. We pushed hard to finish up before the big snows came and we finished mid storm yesterday.  We also dealt with a lot of mechanical breakdowns and seemingly terrible weather everyday as well as some family health issues which we had to take care of.  Bottom line is we are done and it feels great! As I mentioned before, we did boil twice and spent a lot of time walking lines during the warm ups.  Sap ran surprisingly well when it did but we didn't have a whole lot of taps in and sugar content ranged from 1.0-1.6%. It was good to get both RO's running and the evaporator running with no problems, though I need to replace 8 membranes in one RO as it is supposed to process 4000 GPH and it is running at 2200 GPH.  That won't cut it when the Sap runs hard!  We knew we were going to have to do this however. The other big project we are working on is getting our vacuum sensors installed.  Currently we have about 90 out and have another 90 to go.  They are working Ok and have helped us a few times but we need to get them all out and then figure out where to put relays to get them communicating faster.  We are definitely looking forward to putting them to use this season.  We don't have any real warm ups on the horizon but may need to turn the pumps on this weekend.