Site Discussions

Hi Susan,

I came across this video showing a group of otters rolling in the dirt under a tree. It was taken in Singapore. How would you explain their group behaviour? https://www.facebook.com/iJeffTan/videos/10156243303738607/

I tried the check valve spouts a few years ago and didn’t find them to be noticeably effective.  I have no reason not to trust in the official research on them, but I also haven’t heard many endorsements from other sugarmakers as of yet. 

The one season I used them, I noticed that they often became contaminated with a tiny piece of woodchip from the taphole.  The woodchip, or what I would describe more as a particle given that it was really small, would lodge in against the check valve ball and cause the ball to stick in place.  Sap still was able to get out around the ball (thankfully), but it was also able to get back in the hole.  Tapholes were drilled with a new bit and with appropriate care to make a clean hole.

When I pulled spouts at the end of the season, I found that sap in the droplines would often flow out the spout when it was hanging down after just being pulled.  That made me look closer to see what was going on, and that’s when I noticed the tiny wood particles wedged against the balls.

100% clean tapholes would solve this issue, but that is hard to do given that it only takes a fragment of a woodchip to foul it up.

I have a few lines of 3/16 and like how they run, though I will probably continue to lower the tap count on the lines.  I started with 25 taps, then down to 20, and still the taps lower on the line do not run as well as the upper most.  Tim Wilmot recently described in an article that 5 tap runs out performed 15 tap lines, and that agrees with what I’ve seen visually.  Mine tie into my existing system of pumped vacuum where most of the taps are on 5/16.

Haven’t had an issue yet with 3/16 lines getting plugged or gummed up.

Overall 2018 was a good year in terms of final production in our woods.  It was a long one, though, and took a lot of days of short runs to get there.  Thawed out around noon and frozen up by 8pm were how most days seemed to go. 

Enjoy reading your dispatches, Dave, and the comments from others as well.  Thanks.

Dave—

We’ve been using a mixture of 3/16 and 5/16 in recent years and decided to convert everything to 3/16th this year with new drops all around.

I made a little gauge setup that I can use to check the vacuum at each tap hole (unplugging the stubby and plugging in the gauge) and often found vacuum greater than 20 lbs. So that part is amazing, though I also found neighboring lines, identical-seeming in every respect, with no vacuum. My guess is that I hammered too hard and split some holes.

We haven’t been rinsing lines at the end of the season, and my thought was that using check valves to minimize back wash would be cheaper than rinsing. I haven’t had any gumming up issues in the 3/16 so far, though only half of the laterals are more than a season old at this point.

Interested to hear what other people are experiencing with gumming up.

Chuck

Thank you for packing so much detail into this explanation. Gave me just what I needed to know!

Hey Chuck,

We were using check valves—both black and clear. The longer I use them, the less confident I am in them. This seemed like the perfect year for them to help add length to the season, but anecdotally, at least, they don’t seem to have given us any more length than other sugarmakers around here I know who didn’t use them.

By skinny tubing I take it you mean 3/16s? How many years have you been using that and what’s your impression of it? I’ve heard some producers say that they’ve been having problems keeping it clean and unobstructed after a few years of use.

I grew up with butternut trees on our 47 acre”farm” and learned how to crack the nuts open from my father by using a block of firewood and a hammer.

As an adult with my one family we had a few butternut trees on the 5 acres we called home for 31 years and those trees would produce a bushel or two of nuts about one year out of three. Fast forward to four years ago when we moved into a smaller house but with a big enough yard to host two large, mature trees and two that are just barely big enough to produce a few nuts. I was thrilled two years ago when the two large trees produced 15 five gallon pails of nuts. Imagine my delight when in the fall of 2017 I picked up 60 five gallon pails of nuts, primarily from the two large trees.  Truly a labor of love but I enjoy sharing them with anyone who shows some interest and is willing to go through the trouble to crack them. 

If anyone is willing to pay the postage I am willing to ship them some nuts.  I have way more than I can keep up with.

To the person(s) asking for recipes, I will share my favorite which is sure to elicit rave reviews from both butternut aficionados as well as those who have never tasted a butternut and didn’t know what they were missing.  Simply use your favorite pecan pie recipe and substitute butternuts for the pecans. I wager that only a few people on earth have ever eaten a butternut pie!

I have a question. The females seem to stay put after they emerge from the cocoons, attracting the mails to them. If the female cocoon had formed in the wild, the caterpillar would have spun it on or near the host tree/plant. The fertilized female could simply lay her eggs on the plant the cocoon was on. If the cocoon is removed to protect it, or if a purchased cocoon ecloses in a cage, how can we be sure the female will find a suitable host plant?

Thanks.
Charlie

Posted for Candace Neary, submitted to our office:

I just read Susan Shea’s article in the Mountain Times and the Rutland Herald about the salt cravings of porcupines. It brought back

memories from the 1950s. Here in Mount Holly, there were many porcupines…eating and destroying houses, filling the noses of dogs with quills, and attacking the brakes and other salty surfaces underneath cars.  I remember the time when my mother had a near-accident when her brakes failed to do their job, and we headed for the ditch beside the road. I think it was in the early summer.

Thanks to Susan Shea for her informative article.

I was digging up the roots to a old shrub came back 10 minutes later and found a luna moth caterpillar neon green,feed back.

Calcium chloride or magnesium chloride placed into the stems after cutting in late summer works to eliminate this weed. Can’t be worse than applying Roundup right?

Hi Dave—

Were you using check valves this year? We “upgraded” to check valves this year on our 550 taps and experienced much the same ending as you did - sap clearly running in the woods but not in our two-month-old tap holes. Couldn’t tell if the check valves hadn’t come through or if they had already given us an extra week.

We averaged .20 gallons per tap - a bit better than usual in our red maple-dominated woods, probably due to natural vacuum in the skinny tubing.

Thanks as always for sharing your thoughts with everyone.

A sad day but we still enjoy your commentary and consider them a ritual of our late winter and spring.  Just wait til next year when we will give it Hell again.

For the very first time I have a flying squirrel living in one of my tress.  It is so cute. It comes down at night to eat out of my bird feeder.  They are not considered rodents according to our fish and wildlife biologist.  They are very similar to a sugar glider.  I quess I’m lucky to live in the country where I can appreciate all wildlife.

Hi Dave - thanks for the annual reports again. We had a similar experience to you. We just boiled our last batch on the 11th - like you we were just tired and ready to be done. We made about 5 gallons shy of our goal but it took a little more than a cord of wood extra than usual to get there as we struggled with sap ranging from 1.2 to 1.5. It was a weird season. Time to clean up, pull the taps, and start thinking about the garden.

The bark looks very similar to American elm. An id trick is to remove a loose piece of bark and snap it; if there are alternating creamy-white layers inside, it’s American.

No, the leaves don’t persist in winter.

Very interesting article!

A farmer in southeastern Vermont has this to say about the low sugar content this season:  “I have been consumed by the sugaring season which has been excellent thus far. Volumes and volumes of sap have been harvested and sadly the wood piles have taken it on the chin. The culprit is weak sap. It makes sense, last summer’s grass was voluminous but the quality of the hay below average due to lack of sun - this translates to the sugaring season too - the trees didn’t have optimal sugar producing weather…” Lack of sun last summer was significant in this corner of the state, where the skies were overcast until September. Not enough sun for surplus energy generation to get us through the winter, either.

Dear Mr. Caduto:  I was very fascinated by your website.  As I have been searching to find out what I might have in our wood pile.  For several years now, I get 4 cords of wood, which I have delivered and I stack on pallets.  I have encountered the usual mouse, as we live within 100 feet of woods so mice I am familiar with in the wood pile and in our house.  However, this fall as I was removing the wood from the pile that had been delivered to the stacking area, I had about 20 pieces of wood left to stack.  Well, did I get a fright.  As I had two pieces of wood in my left hand and was taking a third with my right hand, this fiesty little grey rodent litterally ran out from under the remaining wood and ran around my feet squeeking!  I have never encountered this before.  Especially, for a rodent in which I had not cornerned.  I then proceeded very carefully to use my ergoonmic snow shovel to carefully move each piece of wood toward myself, as I knew this creaturel was hiding under the remainining pieces of wood.  When I finally reached the last piece this rodent actually was quite upset and moved away about 15 feet squeeking as if he was upset his “home” had been dismantled.  I have been attepting to find out what type of rodent this is.  And I believe according to your description and your fellow readers, I have a shrew.  A few weeks ago-mid March, I was walking toward the remaining wood pile, which now consists of 20/30 pieces of wood, and if I didn’t hear his whistle.  As if telling me, leave his home alone!  As I was removing the wood very carefully, he had scurried about 10 feet away and whistled.  As I get my wood at night to bring into the house.  I am now using a pole to remove the tarp carefully and moving each piece of wood before I pick it up.  Possibly your other readers have had similiar situations.  I certainly will not trap the little guy, as I am sure he is eating the spders and bugs that like to nest in the wood pile.

I have learned at Pocono Environmental Education Center that black bear eat skunk cabbage first thing when they awaken from hibernation.  They do this because it is a diuretic, and it cleans them out from their months of winter sleep.

Enjoyed reading this well-written article by my colleague Yurij Bihun.  Having worked in Romania on these issues for more than decade, I could not agree more that a historical lens is essential for understanding anything related to forests and forestry in that part of the world.  For more information on our research using remote sensing to document illegal timber harvesting, please see:

http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/wkeeton/pubpdfs/Korn et al. 2012_Biological Conservation.pdf

http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/wkeeton/pubpdfs/Knorn_et al_Loss of old-growth-forests in Romania_Env Cons_2013.pdf