Butternut Mountain Farm

In spite of warm weather earlier this week, the sap is still running in our woods. Last night the temperatures went down into the 20's, which should have been enough to rejuvenate the trees. Here are a few updates from the farm.

From the Farm, April 11th: What a weekend! We had a great run on Friday, the best I have seen at the sugarhouse. It was wonderful to see everyone here on Saturday for the Company sugar on snow party. What a beautiful day.

Shortly after people left we lost power, which made the afternoon more exciting than it needed to be. We setup the tractor and generator to power the sugarhouse. When I turned the vacuum pumps on they flooded because of all the sap backed up in the lines. Once all the backed up sap and vacuum was out of the system we tried again. It worked, however, there was sap to clean up in the pump house and upstairs in the sugarhouse. By 4:30 we had utility power again and were back up and running.

Saturday night the sap ran all night around 200 gallons an hour and then Sunday it pickup up to 600 gallons an hour. This would have been a good run any other time during the year but after Friday it seemed like a slow run. Now we will have to wait and see what the weather will do. ~ Ira

From the Farm, April 12th: We collected 6000 gallons of sap last night and the sap is running around 200 gallons an hour. The temperature never reached 70 here but we have not had a good freeze the past couple of nights. If it stays cool and we do get a couple freezes we should be able to keep going into this weekend.  ~Ira

From the Farm, April 14th: It froze last night and the sap has just started to run (it's two o'clock now). We collected 1500 gallons of sap last night and it is currently running at 150 gallons an hour. Even with the sun outside it still feels cold. The temperature is 36. I don't know if it will warm up enough today to get a good run. Yesterday we made three barrels of B. The first really dark syrup we've made all season. ~ Ira