Our whole family is involved. You could say it's a tradition. We started tapping today. We had 3 crews going. My hubby and Z (our middle son), D (our oldest) and S (our youngest boy), L (the youngest and a girl) and myself. We tapped for two hours in the morning and came in to recharge our cordless drill batteries, rested and ate lunch then back out for another two hours. We had to tap with snowshoes since the snow is a bit deep in the woods. It makes for a much more tiring job and much harder to walk around the tree and under/over pipeline.
We were about an hour in this morning and my daughter fell with her snowshoes on. I crossed the line to help her and when I pulled her up, she came but her boot/snowshoe stayed. She fell back down and when she did she fell on my snowshoes, right behind my legs, sending me off balance and I fell backwards over the top of her. We layed there giggling for quite a while. Getting up out of deep snow sometimes can be tricky. It may involve rolling over, lifting your legs straight up to get them alined, anything goes as long as the end result is getting out of the snow. What a chuckle. Thank goodness no one was video taping that. We'd win funniest home video for sure though!
My husband is a diehard. He outlasts us three to one. We're in now, recharging our batteries both in the drills and our bodies. My hubby is still out there going. Tomorrow, we'll be up and at 'em early, hoping to get a few more lines tapped out. Thank goodness the kids have no school until after town meeting day. Hopefully we'll be finished up by the time they head back. Doing a few lines/sections a day is the only way my body can handle it, using snowshoes.
It won't be long, the air will have that sweet boiling smell drifting up to the house. A new R.O. arrived yesterday. We got a size bigger this year. An R.O. (Reverse Osmosis) takes some of the water content out of the sap, making it more concentrated, which means less time boiling it down to syrup. Less time also means less wood burned, which means less wood to cut and put up. So it all around save time and money. You could definately say it pays for itself over time.
We sell most of our syrup in bulk to Highland Sugarworks. If you visit our sugarhouse you can purchase syrup direct but we don't get into shipping a whole lot of syrup, unless it's a gift to someone from a local customer.
I love the aroma when my hubby is boiling in the sugarhouse. The steam as you get closer makes your mouth water it smells so sweet!
Anyway, I'm going to go put my feet up and get rested for tomorrow!
Highland Maple Syrup Recipes From Old Vermon
The Vermont Maple Syrup Cook Book
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