Update: April 2 (nine days after initial tapping)
If you'll pardon the pun, the taps have opened. During the last few days, we've continued to experience cold nights but increasingly warm daytime temperatures. The warmest of these days was April 2nd, where the temperature soared to 15C. This has resulted in a dramatic increase in sap production, and we needed to respond quickly or else completely exhaust or storage capacity. Even the smaller Sugar Maples have become much less anemic in their sap delivery.
Here's the breakdown of the last three days:
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March 31: Silver Maple sap - 7.5L, Sugar Maple sap - 5.9L
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April 1: Silver Maple sap - 7.0L, Sugar Maple sap - 4.6L
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April 2: Silver Maple Sap - 16.0L, Sugar Maple sap - 12.8L
New grand totals? 49 litres of Silver Maple sap, and 36 litres of Sugar Maple sap, for a combined total of around 84 litres. In just three days, we've gone from a total sap output of just over 30 litres to a total sap output of well over 80 litres. As you can see, a big increase in output. Not being all that experienced or knowledgable about maple sap, we're pretty impressed. Who knew these unassuming city trees could hang with those fancy-dancy sugarbush country trees?
To try and handle all of this volume, I borrowed a large propane-powered turkey fryer from my friend Chris. This greatly speeded up the initial boil-down, allowing us to achieve an initial 10:1 reduction four or five times as quickly as before. We also created a new and larger "snow-fridge", allowing us to potentially keep one hundred litres of un-boiled sap in a refrigerated environment (at least until the pile of snow melts!).
It is clear that fairly soon, we'll have to start making batches of maple syrup. Using the standard 40:1 ratio, we should now have enough for two litres of actual maple syrup, and based on current rates and the weather forecast, we're going to probably continue with large sap flows for the next week. So, we need to get crackin'. Stay tuned...
