Nearing The End of The Season

This morning I came up to the farm and fed the barn cats some food and the cows some hay. Dad and I worked on getting sap wagon fixed up. I welded some and dad did some as well. Later I brought it back to the woods and parked it at the shack. Dad was already boiling sap by the time I got back there. I put the PTO pump back on the tractor and hooked up all the hoses and clamps. I did some running back and forth today to bring friends and family back to the shack to help out. We gathered our back loop that we did not do yesterday. We gathered it with lots of help, and when we were pulling the loaded wagon up to the shack to unload, we had another minor incident. There are old railroad ties put in the ground where the tractor drives along the shack. Since it has been a very muddy wet year, the dirt before the first tie had been pushed out of the way, so when we pulled up to dump the sap, the wheel had a hard time getting over the hump. It shear off the bolt holding the bracket to the frame. The wheel hub's height is adjustable and it is held in place by a bracket that is bolted to the frame. The bolt sheared off when the wheel wouldn't go over the hump, so now we have to fix the other side of the wagon this time. We pumped some of the sap from the bottom tank into the top one until it was full. We unloaded the 550 gallons sap we got today into the bottom tank and then I pulled forward so we could get the blue tube hooked up that way we could gravity feed the sap into the shack. I brought some people home and when I got back I began to dig little paths for the water to drain out from the ruts. The 3 inches of snow we got last night was gone just like that and all that water just accumulated in ruts. We walked through the woods to see how full the buckets we got yesterday were, and they were almost full. We could gather it all, but we have to fix our sap wagon first and we have no sitting storage at the moment either. The other issue is how much more syrup can we make with the amount of wood we have left. We are getting down to our last section of wood, and once that is gone then we are done. Later after dark I came home to pick up dinner and bring it back to the woods. I fixed the fire a couple times and then timed how much sap we were boiling an hour. Right now we are boiling off about 96 gallons of sap an hour. We can be pretty precise now because our flow meter shows us how much sap has flowed into the flue pan. I came home on a mini bike because it started to mist outside. I threw 16 pieces of wood on the fire and then went up and fed my cows hay for the night. Dad made 13 1/2 gallons of syrup tonight.