Sap Head

stove number two

Saturday I had hoped to get a bunch of sap boiled down. All week the weather had been forecasted to be sunny and in the 50s. We had lots of downed wood in the yard to feed a fire. I had a brick stove constructed near the garage. I thought I was all set. But as luck would have it, Saturday dawned cold, grey, wet, and windy. By late in the day, the high finally reached 42 degrees Fahrenheit with a wind chill of zero. I waffled a bit when I was getting started, as to whether to follow through or not, but then I remembered my fridge full of sap and decided I HAD to get going. So… I moved all the bricks and cement blocks to the patio under the seasonal gazebo frame so that I could rig up a tarp over the stove if I needed to keep rain/wintry mix out of my pan. Then with my oldest son's help, I constructed the stove over again. 

sap that hadn't been boiling too long

It turned out to be a flop. First of all, if I had more cement blocks, I would have built the stove higher off the ground so that I didn't have to kneel or squat with a kid in the "backpack" carrier in order to feed  the fire. Secondly, all the snow had JUST melted or was in the process of melting, so it was a squishy, slippery, muddy mess. We had to scrape two inches of solid ice off of the patio just to build the stove. Once we scraped it off, what was left was a slick mess. Third of all, the sticks and bricks were thoroughly saturated. This meant that the fire was hard to start and hard to keep going. Both the bricks and the sticks let off lots of steam, which gathered under the pan, condensed, and dropped back into the fire. I tended the stove all afternoon, making modifications in brick height, fuel type, exhaust holes and their placement, kind of pan, etc. I really wasn't able to get the sap to boil steadily! The cold air temperature and strong winds, combined with the wetness of everything "did me in".

I filtered the sap through a wire mesh strainer from the
buckets into the pans. When adding
the condensed sap to the final pan for sugaring off, I
filtered through cloth. 

On Sunday afternoon, I broke down and hauled out the portable electric burner. It defeated the frugal nature of the whole endeavor (getting free syrup in exchange for labor and getting rid of downed branches at the same time) but the sap has a limited "shelf life" before it has to be frozen (about seven days), so time was of the essence. The stock pot of sap simmered away, but didn't accomplish much more than I had accomplished the day before. 

This is what the final pan's contents looked
like shortly before it was syrup.

So Monday all bets were off, as the saying goes. I lit the propane side burner on the grill under one stock pot (hemmed in with bricks to retain the heat and make it rise around the pan) heated the other stock pot on the electric burner, and turned my electric roaster pan to "steam". All day I ran in and out of the house changing diapers, checking and emptying sap buckets, facilitating "schooling", filtering more sap into hot pans, doing laundry and dishes, etc. It was still windy, but warmer. I was able to keep the stock pots simmering. And the roaster pan steamed, but it mainly served as a way to preheat the sap before I transferred it into the stock pots. (FYI: the boiling point gets higher and higher the more condensed the sap gets.)

One of the 3 containers of syrup

Today, it reached a shocking 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind wasn't too bad, so it was much easier to maintain a steady boil. I was down to only about 8 or 9 gallons left to boil off. I had to fight off bees and moths today due to the sudden warm spell! I was still in and out of the house. But my treks outdoors were filled with pleasant, spring sounds. The aluminum stockpot made a bubbling roar on the electric coil. The propane made a rippling whoosh. The ducks made a splashing, quacking ruckus in the meltwater down on the frozen pond. The sandhill cranes trilled encouragement to each other every so often as they passed high overhead. The flickers churred. The goats bleated whenever I was in sight. The bluebirds alighted on the fence and darted to the ground for tidbits with a whir of wings. And by dinner time I finally reached the end product: several quarts of golden, sweet maple syrup!

Since it was the first day to reach 70 degrees this year, I gave the kids ice cream after our soup dinner. (We're having soup for dinner every night of Lent, excluding Sundays.) The added bonus was the fresh, warm maple syrup I drizzled on top! As we ate our ice cream, the calls of a few spring peepers drifted in through the open window. It's hard to believe that snow is forecast for tomorrow! Perhaps it will be a sugar snow, and we will get another run of sap.