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First Thunder, Lightning, and Syrup

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March 10th through 16th, 2025

Last week started out with the roads mostly clear, the lake ice tight to the shore, and sap in the buckets spiled to the maples in the woods. The week ended in much the same state. In between the Monday and Sunday was much sap collection, boiling, and Ibuprofen. Most of the days started with sun, air in the 20s°F, and turkeys on the deck rail. At the start of the week, Goudzwaard's Creek continued to overflow its banks during the above freezing days. The ice that has covered Knott Lane for months slushified and the path turned more mushy and less treacherous. Lows below freezing and highs in the 40s°F make them maples run. On Monday, we starting collecting all those drops. The sap was cold, crystal clear, and plentiful. The first hundred gallons was soon all in jugs and on its way back to the cookers. To free up jug space, the camps main pan and auxiliary pan was directly filled with 30 gallons each to get things started. As long as the fireboxes are filled, we boil off about 10 gallons an hour. At first, with the sap flowing from the trees and the new RO system not up, to avoid being drowned in sap, boiling operations started at dark'o clock in the morning and continued past mid-night. Less than 48 hours from trucking it out of the hills, the contents of the auxiliary pan was added to the finishing pan. Hydrometer readings were taken every 10 minutes as the boil got closer to syrup. Eventually it made syrup and was run through a plate filter. The first batches are very light, tasty, and considered the Lamborghini of the tapping world. Early in the week, only the vehicles with feet dared to trek deep into the fields. We ended up with 775 gallons of sap for the week. On Friday morning, we had just under an hour of thunder, lightning, and hard rain. After it ended, we measured a half an inch in the rain gauge, the remaining snow was in full retreat, and the turkeys were off the rails and running around like lunatics. By Sunday evening, the bottle rocket war forts, built just over 5 weeks ago, were no more. The last task of the week was to check the lake ice. The ice sheet that covers Lucerne is just over 15 inches thick. We also got a little bit of snow on Sunday. Due to a disturbing camera malfunction, I did not recover any images of the many snow devils that danced up and down the lake late Sunday morning. With 2 weeks left in the month and 15+ inches of ice on the lake, a <a href='/iceout/IceOut2025.html' class ='defaultlink2' target='_blank'>March Ice-Out</a> seems unlikely. But you never know. What does seem likely given the long term forecast, is that we'll have over 3,000 gallons of sap by April 1st. The RO thingy seems to be working well, so the burn times should be semipermeable membraneally cut in half. No more 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM burning times for us. Huzzah!<br><br><br>-Nemo's running around the sugarbush like a lunatic.

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