Last Boil at The Sugar Shack

 

Today my dad came home early to start boiling. I went back to the woods to help him with the setup and I also scooped out all the ash. We got the fire going just after 1:00, and I helped fix it a few times throughout the night. I came up to the farm for a little bit and threw in a bunch of hay for the cows. I cleaned out one of the small pens in the barn that had straw and other stuff in it, and then I came home. I got all the clean filters into a bag and then headed back to the shack again. I checked the sugar content in the sap we were boiling, and it was about 1.6%. I helped dad load up the wood rack, and then I warmed up a burger and cornbread in the wood stove for dinner. I came back up to the farm later at night and fed my cows more hay and 4 ears of corn. At home I stoked the fire and threw in 18 pieces of wood. I headed back to the shack again and we continued boiling. I bottled a lot of syrup through the night, and later Randy Wilcox stopped by for a little while. Tonight our last draw off of syrup was at 11:00 and I worked on bottling the rest from there. We cleaned up everything like normal and washed filters and drained hoses. We boiled 845 gallons of sap today and made just under 14 3/4 gallons of maple syrup. Our total now is 180 3/4 gallons and 1 pint. This season, we boiled 10,895 gallons of sap, and with the amount of syrup we've made, on average we were boiling about 60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. We came up from the woods at midnight. 

Last Maple Syrup Pull Off of The Season