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Dispatch from the Sugarwoods 2015 Part 2

So we got our first run the end of last week, and made our first syrup on March 14. That was also the day we finally finished tapping, thanks in large part to our friends Ginny and Court who traveled south to pitch in. We had a couple day warm spell that would have made for a great run most years. But this year there’s still so much snow, and things have been so cold, that the trees are still a little logy. The weather felt like it should have been running gangbusters, but the trees had other ideas.

We got a decent run Tuesday last week, and made really light, top, top-shelf syrup. Some of the best I’ve ever tasted. Then a cold front swept in from the north on 60-mile-an-hour wind gusts and shut everything down. All told we’re at 104 gallons, about 1/8 of a crop.

We had a school class come by on Tuesday morning and I took the kids up into the sugarbush. My first step was to pull a tap that was under high vacuum pressure and let the kids feel it – the spout made a kwwwwooohweet sound and stuck to whatever it touched. Mostly fingers. Their first question was whether sucking the sap out of a tree hurts it (the tree), and I quickly lapsed into this big, convoluted explanation about carbohydrate reserves that went way over the fourth grader’s heads. Blah, blah, blah. (If you’re interested in the blah blah, you can read it here.)

I spend a lot of time editing scientists, which often entails trying to breathe life into dry writing. And yet here I was dry storytelling – aware of it as I was doing it and unable to do anything about it. I needed an editor, and imagined someone standing next to me, like a translator or a sign language interpreter who could help make this information palatable to children, but of course imagining this didn’t do my talk any good – it just added another layer of distraction. Thankfully I was bailed out by a porcupine den in a big old monarch maple nearby. At the end of the trip the teacher asked the class what they liked best and the answer was, “the porcupine den!” In second place, snowfleas, followed closely by the brownies at the sugarhouse. We sent them home with a half-pint of syrup each, imagining them bringing it home and their parents making nice pancake breakfasts that weekend. The teacher later estimated that maybe a few teaspoons in total made it home; the kids carried the bottles around like flasks and took nips with their friends all afternoon.

Anyway, speaking of high vacuum, this year’s big technology buzz is 3/16ths tubing, which proponents are touting as a way to achieve high vacuum levels with no vacuum pump. Tim Wilmot, a maple scientist at Proctor Maple Research Center in Underhill, Vermont, is the chief researcher in the Northeast who’s been experimenting with the product. Here’s a story Wilmot wrote on the subject in The Maple News.

Traditional tubing is 5/16-inch in diameter, which means the new stuff is about 36 percent smaller. And because it’s smaller, it fills with sap quicker. When the line if full, the weight of the sap draws a vacuum on the enclosed space in the tubing.  The formula is that every 1.14 feet of sap creates 1 inch of vacuum, so in theory, a 20-foot column of sap would create 17.7 inches Hg in the space above the liquid. Things get even more dramatic as the column of sap gets longer.

So the ideal set-up would be a really long 3/16-inch lateral line, with lots of drops on it, that’s completely full of sap. This is ironic because this is the way that most of us used to build our tubing infrastructure, and then we ripped it all down because with a vacuum pump you want short lateral lines, with a limited number of drops per line (“strive for five!”), and oversized main lines.

There have been some favorable reviews of the new 3/16ths lines – and I’ve got to admit that the prospect of high vacuum with no electricity or pumps or releasers to maintain sounds really nice – but the verdict is still very much out. Maybe it’ll catch on, or maybe it’ll prove to be a flash in the pan like those anti-microbial spouts that were going to revolutionize the industry. If you’ve had experience with 3/16-inch tubing, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how it’s working out.

Read Dispatch from the Sugarwoods 2015 Part 3

Discussion *

Mar 20, 2015

Dave:

Interesting article, one small math error: 3/16th tubing is actually 64% smaller than 5/16th, not 36% as stated in the article.

Amazing production from the non-vacuum vacuum tubing. As referenced in the article, 36 gallons per tap - wow!

Jim Curtis
Mar 20, 2015

Sorry, no technical information to offer. But I must say, the numbers involved in making the whole thing work spin my brain!

Carolyn

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