End of sapping season

It was a red-letter, record-breaking day today with temps heading up over the 70˚ mark--76 in Duluth, I think I heard.  So if the maple syrup season wasn't ending before, it did today.  But it's been a great season!

We began with our usual grove of maple trees.  Things were pretty slow at first, of course, until the weather got into a good pattern of warm-ish days and below freezing nights.  This grove is down in a ravine so it takes a while for the roots warm up enough for the sap to begin flowing nicely.  And look...no snow!  Last year we couldn't get near these trees without slogging through 2+ feet of snow.  So...no maple syrup last year!

Since our first trees were going so well, Leann moved further into the trees, cleared out some brush, and put in a few more taps.  I think by the end we had buckets hanging on 24 taps.  We could see places on the trees where my Dad had tapped them probably 30 years ago.  The holes heal over but you can still see remnants of the scar.

We cooked down accumulated gallons of sap about five different times out in our "sugar shack" on this old cook stove.  The 40:1 ratio of 40 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup creates lots of steam so it has to be done outside or in an out-building.  We visited my cousin Rollin up the road to see his syrup operation.  He had 84 taps in trees and cooked it all outside on a cooker fashioned from a metal barrel set on its side with a grill on the top and wood-burning space underneath.  He REALLY had a good boil going!

This was our boil after several hours of cooking.  The sap would have been nearly up to the top at first so getting it cooked down this far was progress.  We burn using lots of our apple wood from trimming trees around here, and we're still using scrap lumber pieces from building our house three years ago!

And here's the end product.  All the different colors of syrup happen from collecting at different times in the season, different sugar content, and other variables.  All the colors signify different quality grades, but since we aren't selling it, we just use it as it comes.  And it all tastes pretty good!  We did one more batch yesterday so I think we are up to about three gallons now.

While tooling around in our UTV (Cammie) in our tropical 72˚ weather today we saw this last vestige of winter hiding in the shade of the hill.  We really haven't had very much snow all winter, so this might be left from that first big storm back in November.  Why does it feel like we haven't suffered enough this winter for it to be spring already??

And finally, out on my walk today, I saw this little guy scooting along on our road.  And there was one more a little further up the road.  I thought they were only around in the fall when the width of their red stripe predicted how bad the winter was GOING to be.

Not sure if this is good sign or not!