Another Day Another Gallon

Today was a nice sunny day even though the ground was still a sheet of ice. After work, I came up to the farm and fed my cows a couple square bales of hay outside. I was unable to walk up the slightest incline since it was so icy, so I had to crawl on my knees while pushing the bales to the feeder. After that we headed back to the woods and got ready to start boiling. I got our canner starting to warm up and then I scooped out a bucket of ash from under the arch. Dad drained the front pans and then I got the flow meter and hoses hooked back up. We got the pans back on the arch and then we filled the firebox full of wood and lit it. I worked on getting a fire going in the wood stove in the kitchen part of our shack to heat some water and warm the place up. Dad noticed that the sap was not flowing into the flue pan, so we frantically tried to fix the issue. We think it was a piece of ice or something that had clogged the hose, but if he hadn't caught that then this whole thing could've gone south real quick. I pumped a bunch of sap into the inside tank and then I helped dad bring in wood to refill our wood rack. I fixed the fire a couple times and then I had to go home to get mom and dinner. When we got back, we had dinner and I restocked our wood rack for the wood stove. We had friends and family come by to hang out and enjoy the night back at the shack. I came home after 9:15 and fed my cows hay for the night and then put 30 pieces of wood on the fire. We made 5 3/4 gallons of syrup tonight and tomorrow we hope to finish boiling the rest of the sap.