With cold nights (~20 degrees) and warm days (~50 degrees) it's a great time to be tapping maples for their sap! We have about 10 collection buckets outside Stonehurst Showroom, and on a good day they all fill. If you take a trip through this neck of the woods, you'll see many of our neighbors doing the same with smaller and larger setups.
Filled buckets are transferred into a 50 gallon drum which sits in the shade of our wood shed. Getting too warm would cause the watery sap to spoil before it's boiled down into maple syrup. This drum does get hit with about an hour of sun in the late afternoon--oh well :-)
Once the drum is full, we pump the sap from there into an empty drum on a pickup truck and take it offsite to strain and boil. Boiling temperatures and methods are a science and an art, with lots of folks offering their opinions for what makes the best maple syrup!
Pancake luncheon anyone?
