Newsletter #245 2024 Feb 09 Friday

The start to the Pure Maple Syrup Season; it started perfectly, but today I found the hard way that I had made a major mistake.

Primal Woods and Homestead Rebel Farm

The great plains drinks the blood of Christian men and is satisfied. -- O.E. Rölvaag

Giants in the Earth

If I do my job with the oxen, this will be the last year for horses. That requires two “improvements;” training of the oxen, and training an evaporator operator to handle those duties while I’m in the woods with the oxen. Or, I could do the reverse, but that would mean less fun for me!

Pure Maple Syrup

The season started off perfectly, with tapping on Monday and Tuesday, collecting Wednesday and Thursday, and evaporating Wednesday through today. This morning, the probably reared its ugly head. I make complete checks of the evaporator every 10 minutes, and just before noon today I opened the syrup pan hood only to smell smoke, and not syrup! I flooded the syrup pan to prevent burning it up, turned off the furnace blower, and waited for the pan to cool down. This was my worst syruping nightmare come true, burning up a very expensive stainless steel pan.

That’s burned syrup you see above. Periodically I reverse the flow through the syrup pan to prevent scale buildup; the first reversal was today at start-up. As it turned out, one of the valves controlling the flow of concentrated sap to the syrup pan was closed when I thought is was open; therefore as evaporation took place the fluid level at the inlet to the syrup pan was not maintained at the proper level, causing the burn and smoke. Since I have thought about this potential problem a lot though, and what I would do if I encountered it, I was able to react and contain the problem quickly.

As you can see above I was able to clean the syrup pan, and no catastrophic damage resulted from my mistake. The evaporator is reassembled, properly this time, and I will start again tomorrow. The good news is, I suppose, that the only liquid lost was about 3 gallons in the syrup pan; the flue pan and the sap pre-heater were unaffected.

Having said that, it was not a good day in the Sugar House. On another positive note though, we’ve made 8.5 gallons of syrup so far, and we’ll add to that total on Saturday.

Just think, you could have been here as witness to all of the excitement!

I was travelling last weekend, hence no News section in this Newsletter, and for my return trip I purchased a book.

Storm Watch, by C.J. Box. It’s set in Wyoming, but the plot will be familiar to Michiganders; even if the story does end more favorably than it did in Michigan.

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I apologize for the short update; it’s been a busy few days. All the best, and may God bless you and yours,

John & Geri