With a short break from 1 am to 4 am last night the sap continued to run. Our production is about 50% of an average year and the weather continues to look favourable.

The strong winds today may have caused some tree limbs to fall and damage our pipe line and tubing system..The system is under vacuum to stimulate sap flow and we try to operate at 25 inches of mercury..Perfect vacuum is 29.92 inches of mercury so our system is very leak tight. Each inch of vacuum induces about 1% more sap flow so it pays to keep the vacuum as high as possible.A broken tube  causes a leak and a  drop in vacuum by about 1 inch of mercury. A broken pipe will drop the vacuum by about 5 inches of mercury. We have about 30 miles of tubing and 10 miles of piping so it’s a major challenge to keep everything tight and requires daily patrols.Pipelines and tubing systems are much less labour intensive than traditional bucket systems and help to keep the price of syrup affordable. To the casual observer they look quite simple.But they are expensive to set up and require regular maintenance and cleaning. I’ll report on the repairs we have to make afterr this wind storm.

Saturday looks very promising with sunshine and seasonal weather.  Sunday will be a bit cooler but still bright sunshine. It’a a good time to visit a sugar bush before the Covid-19 virus is more prevalent.

The Kettle Boys, the Shanty Man and our main evporator will be in operation tomorrow. We are open from 10 t0 5 pm