On Friday, we collected our largest sap run yet of 200 gallons. We hang 125 buckets which must be dumped by hand into a 5 gallon pail and carried to a “dumping station” where it is dumped into another 5 gallon pail that has a line running down the hill and into our large storage tank.

Usually, four of us go up the hill to empty sap buckets. If we carry 200 gallons of sap, that is a total of 1600 pounds of sap, which averages about 400 pounds per person working! Wow! Then we will boil the sap for countless hours. After all of the water is evaporated out of the sap it will have taken 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. So this Friday’s run will give us approximately 5 gallons of syrup.

So the next time you eat our maple syrup dribbled on your pancakes, think of the hands that carried all of that sap and the numerous hours of boiling it took for you to enjoy your breakfast!