Keith Armstrong Transcript
And it’s
(the land) kind of interesting how it came to be in the family it would have
been my great Grandfather’s who was only 37 years old when he died and he was
very young and there were 5 boys that he had and his wife who was my great
Grandmother, out where Yoshi’s or Hooligan’s is, that’s where they lived
and then because they needed to sustain themselves the Lantlen family
contributed but the townspeople down there knew the Armstrong’s who had just
lost their father they got together and had 68 acres and they had to work with
all hand tools on about 6 or 7 acres of open land down there and everything was
out with a hand saw so that’s why so many people were involved they claimed
that there 97% of population living off the land and where it’s the reverse,
it’s 2% now that do the kind of things I do so we’ve become a very small
minority. We occupy probably more of the acreage than the most of the population
and we’re kind of a rare species even in my lifetime it’s changed
drastically this particular farm was my Grandfather Hilliard’s. He acquired
this piece by piece when he was a young child he grew up in what is the Mount
Tabor National Forest in the town Landgrove and now its all been turned over but
the people farmed and had cows and one of the things at that time if you had two
cows that was considered 50% of your livelihood so that that in itself was
drastic at how many people would be content with just providing just milk to
sustain themselves that’s all they were really doing at that time and now you
girls have got a car as teenagers and its just unbelievable how much progression
we’ve made and I don’t know if enough people appreciate it and its really
come a long way in two or three generations and we really should be appreciative
I think people really do appreciate what I’m doing I’m always shocked in a
way because I’ve lived through a part of that transition and I haven’t
looked at this as something that different from me to be doing what I’m doing
I’ve bred cows because I wanted to be involved in agriculture I really never
thought I would be able to own 97 acres the new road (the Bypass) took 13 acres
of it it wasn’t the very best land as good as the land down here there are a
couple of fields over there and up on that hill where I plant pumpkins and I
came down here because I knew that this thing had to be fixed and I was down
here for about 5 minutes before you girls came here so were right on time I’m
fixing a mould board plough that’s something
that actually was developed by George Washington the founder and he was very
interested in agriculture and very innovative he was way ahead of his time as
far as agriculture practices and planting cover crops which were encouraged big
time because that puts nutrients back into the soil there had gotten to be a
period of time where there was so many cows and that kind of thing that the
manure was the way the soil was kept enriched by taking the hay off and feeding
it to the cow or horse and taking it back on the land so you had that process of
putting the nutrients back into the soil but now there are fewer and fewer cows
but if you grow the right crops, see those strips down there, that’s where the
vegetables this year will be planted where its ploughed and in between that’s
rye and its to the stage where I can plough it any time and incorporate that
into the soil I actually wont grow any crop to sell any crop to sell on that
soil this year and then next year I will plough them strips where the field as
soon as the sweet corn, pumpkins, melons, and tomatoes whenever I plant them
over in this period over here is winter squash and will be all seeded down to
the rye again that will be the green area next year at this time those green
areas that you see will be the ploughed area and we rotate by doing that and
there’s all kinds of things that go on any one plant can extract different
things out of the soil and then there’s some things that build up at a higher
level than nature is really meant to sustain and one of those things is called
nematodes and if you get too high of a population in the soil that if you stayed
with lets say corn for 15 or 20 years the corn wont do very well but if you take
that land out of corn and rotate it into vegetables then into rye one of the
best things you can grow is a plant called Hairy Vetch and
alfalfa, clover all of those kinds of crops extract nitrogen out of the air and
that’s what George Washington realized that article that I just read recently
talked about that, and there I just thought we just recently knew that but
George Washington knew that in the early 1700’s he was practicing the same
thing so that, so its nothing really new we just kind of put in on the back
shelf and new people are doing
these practices to begin because I put this land into the Vermont Land Trust so
that this land can never be developed this land will always be agricultural land
the 83 acres that we’ve got here so for a long term not just my lifetime but
any of ours are here for a really minute part of overall time we’ve got to be
stewards of the land you’ve got to take care of the land so that the next
generation will have land to sustain themselves we need to even though there is
such a small percentage of the population involved in producing it. That’s the
basic ingredient, you absolutely need it will make this whole process continue
and with the equipment we require a lot fewer people to produce the food but you
still gotta have that. And that’s one of the reasons that I wanted the land
put into the land trust because its such valuable land to produce any product
off of like I mentioned I grew up in Pownal and the problem down there the soil
Is fairly rich and you can grow good stuff but it doesn’t drain well and
that’s what happens when the river bottom land underneath the top soil
there’s gravel and we’ve got the river right beyond those trees and that’s
where man did help the process there’s a dam at the Papermill bridge. The
covered bridge the middle one, well that middle bridge was used to generate
power back a long time ago and they aren’t using it for that right now but I
think they might again so they built that dam and it backed the water up what
that did was create a water table that’s only 2-3 feet down in the ground and
because you’ve got a gravel sub-base the water table is there, that land needs
very little irrigation because of river being there and yet the sandy lome
that’s on the top and the gravel when we get rain goes down to where
the water table is very quickly versus in Pownal where it might take a week we
might have to wait 5,6,7 days before I can go on that land it just makes rock.
I’ll get stuck I’ve actually had it happen here it was raining one afternoon
and I went down there and it gets truly soft when its wet and I got stuck and
had to get my tractor and pull myself out back up there the next day I could
drive any where the very next day because it dried to well but it drained so
well but the real benefit was because roots travel far to get moisture when it
gets dry the roots will go down to that water table and it brings the water back
to the plant because its not that far away so it drains but it is also there
available to the plants I bet you in all the country there is probably 1/10% of
that kind of land and yet it would be easy to build buildings on because it
drains so well and that’s what’s been going on for the last 100 years since
development really took off in the country those are the places that they’ve
been building the buildings up where Price Chopper and Walmart is which was
super land just like this and yet up where the new middle school is, that’s
where we should be building not down side the rivers because the other drawback
of building buildings there is when the big flood comes, I mean the big one, we
may not even see one in our lifetime they call it the 100 year flood and
that’s what designates flood plains what might get flooded to that degree
about on average once every 100 years that place then the insurance will be
“oh man look at what it did” and water will
be 3 or 4 feet deep where Walmart and Price Chopper are I know its going to
happen but they built buildings there and they shouldn’t plus overall without
having this ? and drainage advantage that this
particular piece has got that kind of quality soil is only about2% on a national
basis of that kind of soil so we shouldn’t be wasting it but we are and people
have been beginning to realize the value of the land and that’s why there’s
been Vermont Land Trusts created. Massachusetts has the same kind of a program
where they pay me this land was appraised at full market value and then they pay
me approximately 50% of that for the development rights and then the state of
Vermont is in charge even though I will pass on this will not be developed I can
always sell it as a farm we set it up so right here there could be a barn and a
house there are 2 acres here that you could build on this hill but down there
unless the Chinese take us over, if our rules and regulations stay in place this
will stay agricultural.
The
old way an open pan and some rocks out in back and there was only about 7 or 8
trees I would tap and I used the real but the old way I didn’t create it or
anything you take the sumac, it’s a weed tree, in the center of that there’s
a real soft center piece and you can push that center piece out with a knife and
you get them about the right size, 7/16 to fit the bit, the drill bit, and there
was metal spouts at that time but that’s what I used where spouts that I made
myself out of sumac and then you drill the hole in the tree and you put them in
and attach a bucket of any kind to catch the sap and then you boil it to go way
back the Native American Indians are the ones that really taught us how to make
maple syrup they discovered the sweetness and then they discovered by putting
sap in real primitive containers, birch bark whatever it is but they would take
real hot rocks and boil the sap and that’s what actually would create the
evaporation process, a very slow process but they had come to realize that they
had got the sugar content sweeter and better the more they did that I don’t
know if they could get it to the level that we get it to when we call it syrup
but basically the sap starts at on average about 2% sugar content when it comes
out of the trees and we’ve got about 3,000 trees that we’ve been tapping
someday I’d like to tap 5,000 and it all comes right to the sugarhouse this
year we had one period where and we got 2.8% and that was exceptionally sweet
for us and when we boil that it evaporates and all the equipment we have now its
all bottom line is evaporating the sap to the point where that 2% becomes 68%
when its syrup its about 68% sugar and in our case I went from 9 or 10 years old
matter of fact I was probably younger than you and I made some syrup and we put
it in quart glass jars and we put it in the cellar stairway and we kind of
forgot it was there and when my dad died I was cleaning the house and cleaning
out some of those areas and there was about 6 or 8 of those jars that were stuck
in the back that we forgot were there and they’d been there for 30-40 years
and that syrup was still perfectly ok because it had gotten sealed properly and
if you get syrup at the right density and now we have a piece of equipment
called the hydrometer. Colonel Ayres,
a real intelligent man who lived right in Shaftsbury right near where you
are just up the road he developed the syrup hydrometer which previous to that
people had discovered through trial and error that you take the dipper and pull
the liquid up and when it would come off the end of the dipper in a sheet
that’s when it was about the right density of sugar content but that’s how
this man developed the hydrometer that has lead
in the bottom of it and when the sugar content gets at that 68% it will float
and they have a red line on it and when it gets to the red line, right even with
the surface of the syrup that’s when its exactly at the right density and it
makes it a lot easier than it used to, it was an art previous to that a lot of
years of experience and that kind of thing to make it consistently right,
because if you get it too light if it isn’t up to that 68% says its only 55%
like that syrup that we kept for all those years it would have spoiled, it would
have molded probably within a couple of years or even within a couple of months
it just spoils and the flavors terrible and you know you won’t consume
it but if you get it too rich say instead of 68% you get it up to 75% sugar
content then over a short period of time and it doesn’t take long less than 6
months it does what
you call sugars and
you’ll find lumps of sugar in the bottom of the container and with glass which
we put a lot of syrup up in up in glass now you can see it you look in there and
you can see it crystallized sugar well when we haven’t paid close enough
attention or the hydrometer hasn’t been accurate because every year we have to
have that checked to make sure it’s doing the job it’s intended to do that
its accuracy is still there, there’s a couple of fellows who work for the
state they are inspectors and that’s one of their jobs is to check our
equipment make sure its accurate so its very important to get the right density
and so like I say now we have that and in my process now I went from that open
pan with no sides and some of the ash would fly out into the syrup and it was
very dark and I never made what you call a fancy syrup because you had all those
factors and you’d leave in there with that whole batch of syrup my equipment
now is pretty up to date my father and I got into making syrup commercially at
about 1975 it was a small amount of money compared to what I’ve got invested
down there the syrup that we produce since then we only put $1500 a piece in to
start with the money that we’ve spent on equipment has always come from the
syrup part of things in itself so its paid for itself in a lot of ways I never
took much money to buy the ordinary things you would think of for an income
it’s a hobby and I like to kind of mock sugar makers its kind of like a
disease you start off with a few trees and then more and more and now I’m up
to 3,000 and 3,000 not big there’s places in Maine that are doing 70,000 –
75,000 taps, one huge operation huge 6 inch main lines and there’s a lot of
men working at it they have an ideal situation up there where there’s a lot of
people that work in the pulp industry and in he spring when it gets real muddy
and you can’t really be in the woods for that period of time so its ideal and
these guys are in great shape because they are working in the woods doing that
kind of work anyways and they’ve got a work force available to them and
that’s one of the problems around here its hard to find people who are
physically fit in the condition that you need to be to go out and do that kind
of work all day its rather strenuous I’ve had good luck getting some of the
wrestlers on the Mt. Anthony wrestling team that’s the kind of condition you
have to be in those guys can go on a hill and beat me, man they’re good. Ben
Frost was on of them who worked for me and he’d run up that side hill that’s
the condition you need to be in. It would be nice if everybody would be like
that but they’re not and yet those men up there doing the pulp work are in
that condition and even though they aren’t high school age they’re 40 or 50
years old but they are doing that kind of work they’ve got a work force and
that’s why they get so big but here there’s just three of us, Janis, myself,
and my best friend Walt Babcock do our operation we started off with originally
with tubing that was when we got into it commercially plastic tubing was just
kind of really getting accepted and there was a lot of people that really
hadn’t gone with it and my father was a good example he had made syrup with a
guy named Free Barrington back
years and years ago we call it the Frasier Bush and he was familiar with buckets
and I had indicated I wanted to make some and he said “well you got to line up
some buckets” and I did, I got a couple of hundred from some of the farmers
but I thought this plastic tubing was the way to go and we tapped about 200 to
250 trees that year up in back of where of the sap house is and its all on a
steep size hill and for the size line I lucked out I didn’t really know at
that time the things I know about it now but that first year I hit it right on
the money because if you go with any more taps on that size line you won’t get
any more syrup because that’s the maximum that that size tube can handle on a
good run and it took a few years of trial and error to realize and then we got
the research Farm in Vermont up in Randolph where they experiment with this kind
of stuff all the time and after a few years it wasn’t very many 3 or 4 they
started coming up with recommendations on how many taps for the size line like
with a ¾ inch line they’re telling us not to go with more than 300 taps which
is actually less than I think you can get away with but I know it will work if
you follow their recommendations in our case with 3,000 we have 1 inch main
lines coming in but I’ve got 1 ¼ and 3 ½ inch so I’m trying to stay under
that 1,000 taps per main line because we lay out the main you call it and then
we have these ¾ inch feeder lines and we won’t put more than 300 taps on any
one of those and off from that ¾ inch line then you’re down to the 5/16 the
original during we used was surgical tubing and the problem with that is that it
stretches versus what we’re using now which has much more of a PVC compound in
it and you put that from here to there and it stays that way it doesn’t
stretch where that surgical tubing over time every year it would stretch and get
a sag in it then the inside diameter of the line would be getting smaller and
smaller we were putting way too many trees on and even with this 5/16 tubing
that we have now its far superior to what we originally used and they are only
telling us to put maximum 10 taps per 5/16 and 5 (taps) is better, you’ll get
better production per tap if you follow those recommendations of 5 taps per
5/16, and so the other thing that’s really come along as I mentioned earlier
is the 7/16 hole and the bit that you used for it was the standard bit and I
made the spouts out of sumac and
here about 5 or 6 years ago there were some experiments and they came up with a
spout called the health spout and that’s about half the size of the 7/16
it’s 19/64 and the reason that its named the health spout is because you get
better health of the tree by tapping it with a small spout and I was interested
in it and I went to a meeting and they had used them for a couple of years and
they cut one of the maples down to show the stain the old style spout would
create and by stain I mean the wood that gets darkened. You’ll drill that hole
and for 8 to 10 inches above there’s this dark wood and it will be an 1 ½ to
2 inches even 3 inches to the right and to the left of that hole that wood would
be dark and if you tapped that same wood in future years the syrup will be of
low quality the sap is not good quality when it comes out of that stained,
darkened wood, well with these health spouts even though the spout is half the
diameter you had half the darkening of the wood it was easier for the tree to
recuperate and it does a lot quicker it heals over in a couple of months after
you take the spout out and we are only drilling an inch or 1 ½ inch deep where
with the 7/16 hole we were drilling 3 inches it’s a lot less damage to the
tree and I think we have to be more careful with the stress that we put on the
trees. So years ago because of all the automobiles and all the other stress that
is out there affecting the trees that we didn’t used to have and the pollution
that we have in the air now versus 50 years ago is a lot more even though the
government is trying to cut it back and I’m glad that they are doing that
they’re making strides in that direction to clean up everything not just the
trees but your lakes and all of that stuff is very important and to work in that
direction and thank goodness they are, but anyways as soon as I saw that tree
that had been cut and dissected so you could see how much stain there was
immediately I switched over to those health spouts and they are made of plastic
and now we’ve made another step I’m going to go to stainless steal spouts
they are the same diameter but the fellow that I bought my reverse osmosis from,
and I’ll tell you what that is in a minute, but I went over to Dan Crocker in
Putney and he does 25,000 taps, he’s got me beat by quite a few. He’s got a
lot of production, he’s a great guy one of those super intelligent fellows.
He’s always experimenting and when he delivered the RO I was in contact with
him all last winter he tapped 5,000 out of the 25,000 at the beginning of
February and he put the new stainless steal spout in and I said, “Yeah well is
he on to something?” You’re not that impressed you hear it but you’re
like, “Yeah ok well.” When it got to the end of the season here and I was
all done the membrane that goes on the R.O. I take it back to him and he takes
it to Canada and has it cleaned and processed and checked at the factory and
then he’ll return it to me and then we went over and he goes, “Hey I want to
show you something,” and we got out and he’s got more main lines coming in
than I do and it’s still running pretty good and he says, “You know what?
That’s the line that I tapped in early February, the ones that I tapped three
weeks later they are all shut off they aren’t running, those are the only ones
that have stainless steel spouts, the rest of them have got plastic spouts.”
And I see it with my own eyes and I can’t believe it, the hole had been
drilled three weeks longer and it was still running and I said, “Whats your
theory? Why is that still running?” And his theory, and I think he’s right,
the black plastic transmits the heat and attracts heat and induces heat into
that hole more than the stainless does. The stainless is thin and light colored.
It’s silver colored and its not creating the heat that that black plastic does
and nature kicks in you put that heat in there and its telling the tree you’ve
got to heal up, the seasons coming. It makes the healing process of the tree
accelerate because of the heat that its creating versus the stainless and all of
your syrup and all of that stuff changes as the days get longer and the days get
warmer you get your very best syrup back in February versus April when the angle
of the sun and the heat of the day and all those things are factors and that’s
where I think this plastic I think he’s exactly right.
So anyways, now I have ordered stainless steel spouts because I think
that’s the way to go. Anything that I can see in most sugar makers are the
exactly the same way I am we really try to take care of our trees and we don’t
over tap our trees we try to follow the recommendations and the reason being is
that you and I can give blood that maple tree can give us sap but don’t take
all of the blood out of you and don’t take out al of the sap out of that tree
because that’s that trees blood so taking a relatively small amount isn’t
going to affect that tree at all because what we are taking is relatively like
you and I giving a pint of blood, it’s virtually nothing. It moves on fine.
You wouldn’t want to and the recommendation on a small tree one tap and never
more than three in my case the most I would ever put on a big tree is two taps,
where when my father was tapping the trees 50 years ago with buckets they would
tap the tree with a 7/16 hole half way through the season when things would
start slowing down to that healing process they would drill another hole right
side of it they drill two 7/16 holes instead of having only two buckets on a
tree they would have 6 or 8. Damn the tree can’t stand that all those trees,
that’s stressing the tree too much, and he and I would disagree on that but we
had an agreement I was supposed to get the sap to the sugar house he was the
boss and we got along that way, but I didn’t tap the trees heavy and I’m not
going to. And as I mentioned some of the reasoning there is the additional
stress from all of the pollution and all of what we’ve got now. We’ve got to
try to think about them and do the right thing so hopefully that Asian beetle,
they found a couple of them and if they get established. They are native to
China they will kill every maple tree in this country we hand cards out with
pictures of the Asian beetle whenever we sell containers of maple syrup because
the experts, the ones that they’ve found so far have been found by everyday
people like you and I and if they find any of them and they’re big too the bug
is about that big and they’ve got these tentacles that come out and they’re
quite long the long horned Asian beetle is the name of it and its got yellowish
orange-ish spots on it I want as many people to know about them so if they see
one they’ll know what they’re seeing and they’ll know to notify me or Jim
White, county forester if you ever find one make sure someone knows so we can
get something done and try to keep them from propagating to the point because
they burrow into the tree and once they get into the tree in a couple of years
they kill the trees and they just go from one tree to the next, one maple to
another. Maple is their preferred species, that’s what they kill the maple
tree, because at one time I guess with the problems of international trade
they’re bringing problems over just like when the Europeans brought diseases
over to the Native Americans that’s what’s been going on, we’re going to
have to deal with it. We’ve got these little brochures that the states been
giving out and they sent some to all those who are producing syrup so that we
can include them one in every container of syrup so we can hopefully educate
enough of the public so they’ll know what these things look like and if they
do see one we can do something about getting rid of them because he could be a
major, major problem in the maple industry if those things get going where they
found them in New York City there was some maples on a two or three block area
where they had gotten in and they cut every single tree down and burned them to
get rid of them and they think they controlled that but there was another
outbreak in Chicago and the did the same thing there this has all been in the
past 3 or 4 years but the maple tree is resilient and has been for the past 5000
years nature itself has pretty good control over things when we bring something
that’s not native to this land or this area where there’s no natural enemy,
that’s when we get in trouble and that’s where the Asian beetle can be a
problem like that tent caterpillar last year in Rutland and Manchester they
defoliated the trees and not down here so much but up in that field I’ve got a
lot of cherry trees up there and there’s been some but down in Pownal I
haven’t seen any but up in that field of about 10 acres I bet you there’s
about 75 to 100 nests of them there are hundreds and hundreds of those
caterpillars in each of those nests. There’s no end to their appetite when
they’re going through that cycle they eat everything in sight and they’ll
defoliate the maples but they have a cycle and they aren’t new to this country
and if you can get through that couple three year period of time they just kind
of go away on their own because of natures build up o predators for them so
nature itself has a way of controlling them so I don’t worry about them nearly
as much as I worry about the Asian beetle because there’s no natural enemies
they just go rampant. The maple tree occupies a relatively small amount of land
here in the northeast and up in Canada, Wisconsin and Ohio also have maples.
That’s kind of it. The rest of the world doesn’t have sugar maples. Maple
trees will live about 200-250. Once you get really hooked on maples you hate to
cut one down its strange to be attached to a tree, like a lot of people do a cat
or a dog I have more feelings for a maple tree than I do for a cat or a dog. I
try to take care of my maple trees because in a way they take care of me so I
better take care of them. But anyways, we evolved to the point where we have a
lot of the latest equipment to process the sap and our evaporator, the original
evaporator was a 5 foot by 4 foot pan and it was rated to process 275 gallons of
sap an hour of the 2% sap and then the next edition we got was called the steam
away and that’s another piece of equipment we set on the existing flu pan and
in an evaporator you have a finish pan that’s 4 feet long by 5 feet wide. The
flu pan is 5 feet wide and 10 feet long and now I have another pan that’s
called the steam away pan that sits on that and that uses the steam that’s
being created by the flu pan that previous to that it just went into the
atmosphere and we lost all that heat and the steam away which was developed
about 10 years ago by a man named Glenn Goodrich, another one of those super
intelligent guys kind of like Dan Crocker. He was setting after boiling sap for
hours and hours and putting in long days and he was stirring his coffee and he
noticed when he created turbulence the coffees steam came up. He dreams up a way
to take the steam off of the pan and conduct it in a series of 2 inch copper
pipes and then to create the turbulence he put two ¼ inch pipes and he’s got
this blower that induces air into them and all the length of that pipe is little
less than 1/8 holes that lets steam out and that’s what causes the turbulence.
So at 190 degrees there’s the same amount of evaporation going on as there is
in the lower pan at 212 degrees because of that turbulence. So now we’ve gone
from 275 gallons of sap to about 450 gallons of sap per hour, but that wasn’t
the end of it. And even with that on the good days we’d boil 10-12 hours, this
year I acquired one of those reverse osmosis machines and that’s a piece of
equipment that’s developed to create drinking water out of ocean water and
what it does is there’s a membrane that you have a pump that creates high
pressure and it forces the liquid through that membrane and the molecules of
salt are similar to size to the molecules of sap so it separates like in salt
water you’re getting water out that you can consume, where without it you
wouldn’t be able to. So somebody came up with the idea to try it on sap and it
works. We can take virtually a high percentage of the water out of the sap
before we even put it into the evaporator. So this year the longest I boiled was
2 ½ hours to the point where people thought that I didn’t make syrup this
year because they didn’t see steam coming out of the sap house. Whereas I was
running this R.O. and it would take if I got 1000 gallons of sap and I run I
through the R.O. that will cut that volume down to about 300 gallons before I
even put it in the evaporator. So you’ve taken 2/3 of your boiling time and
required energy out even before you’ve boiled so now this evaporator or this
process where it was 275 and it went to 450 now you’re up there to 12 to 14
hundred gallons per hour that I can process from that sugar house and it just
amazes me because I’ve gone from an open pan and I have an appreciation for
this and all this has gone on during my lifetime. It’s amazing the amount of
sap you can process in a relatively short amount of time and the quality is
excellent. Actually it will be of higher quality where on that outside pan I
made dark, dark sap, it was almost like tar. 80% of the syrup we made this year
was a fancy color because we could process it so fast and the bacteria doesn’t
get a chance to grow where when the process is slower it sits around, the
bacteria grows in the sap and then makes it darker. Now you can move through
that without the bacteria we had previously, it’s technology, that’s what it
is and it’s out of necessity not dire necessity. Previously when I started we
would gets draws about every 20 minutes and this year I would draw 16 gallons of
sap without stopping.
2nd
Portion
I
divide the wood up into sections and then I made these skids and we pile the
wood on them and I have a winch mechanism
as we learned to take off we eventually put a cable on it and kept pulling the
wood up to us and this past year because of the new equipment I got, we used to
burn all of this wood but this past year these 4 skids that’s all that we
burned because of the reverse osmosis.
The one with the blue unit on top of it is the vacuum realeaser
all the sap from the 2500 to 3000 taps we have up there all of the
sap goes through that. These lines go back over the hill over a mile.
When the sap comes through that filter system then into this tank this is
the final holding tank before it goes into the evaporator and this is R.O. That
processes the sap before we actually boil it but it takes and converts 2% sap
into as high as 12% if you want to run it that sweet I only run it at about 6 ½%
to 7% sap because we have this top pan which is called a steam away pan that’s
using the steam that comes from the conventional flu pan that’s been along for
a long time this is something that was only created 10 years ago at the most and
those pans have still got raw sap in them in about another 3 to 4 weeks I will
take you can see how its fermenting and that’s the purpose of taking raw sap
originally I thought you could do it partially cooked but it doesn’t work and
then it will take its pretty much got the job done that’s all coming clean it
takes all this kind of stuff right off. See that film you just take your finger
and wipe it right off its from that sap working on it it’s a natural organic
cleaner we’ll take the high pressure washer after I drain this out and flush
them pans down then we’ll jack them up and that will be it for the summer what
happens is the sap comes into the releaser goes into the holding tank from the
holding tanks to the R.O. from the R.O. back to and we have one tank on this end
plus the one on the end then it comes out of that into this pan first. This is
the steam away pan as the floats call for it and you see its just these things
are controlled by the liquid I took it off because I filled them right up and
you adjust that so it maintains the level that you want to run it automatically
lets the sap from here down into this pan as you can see the one sitting up on
that level of control it controls the level of sap in there and its important to
keep the sap at a level that’s not too deep because that way you’ll have a
faster evaporation rate and this set of pans down here which is the original
evaporator was rated to boil away 275 gallons of sap per hour and by adding this
pan which is using the steam that was just going in the air up and out the top
of the building we have increased our efficiency from 275 gallons per hour to
about 450, its about a 75-80% increase in the rate that we can evaporate and
then you take in conjunction with the R.O. which has reduced our evaporation
rate by 3 ½ - 4 times that’s why we used so little wood versus what we would
maybe make 300-400 gallons of syrup off of all of that wood cut there now with
all this equipment I can probably make 1500 gallons of syrup off of the things
that’s increased another thing that we’ve added just this past year is an
air tight wood stove this is where we open it up to put all the wood in you can
see how big of an area that it takes to fill that up with wood and we put wood in that about every 10 minutes so but this
year we never ran the evaporator for more than 2 ½ hours and day because of so
much concentration of the R.O. and the steam away and of course the conventional
pan things are a lot more efficient than they used to be
once the syrup comes off from here and because it comes off so fast
those days I draw 15 or 16 just standing continuously I open that valve just a
bit and it would start coming and I would have to use some of the condensed
water to keep it from burning down in the middle then we dump it in here this is
the finish pan and when it goes in there I have a hydrometer to check the
temperature again. This 0 really means 212 degrees and this 7 means 219 degrees
that’s when its syrup when it gets on there or pretty darn close depending on
the atmosphere of the day we put it in here with this piece of equipment you
fill this with liquid and when its at around 200 degrees this rd line will be
right even with the surface of the liquid you’ve got exactly the right density
and this is the thing the Colonel Ayres in Shaftsbury invented or created which
has been a big boost in making syrup that is exactly right so its not too thin
and not too rich. Once we’ve got this we can put about 40 gallons of syrup in
here and we don’t always wait till its full but when we’ve got our batch of
syrup made any where from 15-40 gallons then it comes out of these through the
filter press and I’ve got a couple bank filter press so because we had a lot
of niter in our syrup which creates good
flavor but the filtering process is a little more of a problem so instead of
having one of these (filter presses) I have 2 so then I can filter at least 40
gallons without having to break these down and put the papers in there are one
of these (filter papers) that goes in between each place and there’s a filter
aid called tenacious earth and it’s a
clay the same thing you use in swimming pools to filter the water well we are
doing the same thing with syrup and all that clay does is collect on the paper
and all that does the actual filtering and if you’re going to pack syrup in
glass this is about the only way truly you can get the syrup filtered so that
there are no little fibers and in glass you can see that and with the
conventional felts you can with a filter press as it goes out of the filter
press that’s what this hose will either put into a barrel a stainless steel
drum or if Janis is here and she’s going to can it into the packages that we
take out to the barn and here’s some of those there are 3 different sized
containers the gallon, the quart, and the half gallon this is some of the syrup
that we made at the very last this is the darkest of the syrup and here’s a
sample of that and when you hold that up to the light you see the darkness of
that syrup versus what we made earlier in the season see how much lighter it is,
well that’s considered fancy as the season progresses and the flavor changes
when you get to this I don’t know I prefer the medium myself but this (Grade
B) gets a bit of a bitter taste to
it not much but to me its not a real nice flavor that the fancy of the Grade A
have and we mark the date that we made this and another thing that Janis created
so we know from year to year what we’ve produced see she’s got it written
down here for each year, 2005 see we were late getting started see it was clear
down here till March 17th and in this year we made 13 gallons but
that was in February and one year the earliest we made syrup was February 3rd
but this year we didn’t make any till the middle of March so do you see how
much later we were that unusually late most years its at the 1st part
of March of the end of February
CANNING-If
you don’t put the syrup in a barrel and we put it over here this has a propane
burner to keep the temperature up to 180 degrees and she’ll (Janis0 put it
into the containers.
All
of the equipment that we’ve accumulated over time is pretty much all stainless
steel its easier to clean and keep clean versus English tin which is what they
used to use and with the English tin you couldn’t do what I’m in the process
of doing now (fermenting syrup) because it would eat the finish right off the
metal where as with the stainless steel the acidity that’s created by this raw
sap doesn’t effect stainless steel where it would the English tin it would
take the coating off if I leave the syrup in for too long it has some odor now
but I can get horrendous
Here’s the tenacious earth we put small amounts in I and it’s a finer
grade than what they put in pools the only problem with this is people are here
and they see us putting it in and it looks like sugar.
Here’s the 5/16 tubing that we go from tree to tree this is what is
starts out in there’s the health spout and the “T” goes right into those
lines in front of the tree and you can see the size of those spouts are a whole
lot smaller.
Then
what they used to use and then during the summer months to keep the mud wasps
and insects out of the inside that’s what this is for there’s a cap and you
just put it on there and that will be right on the side of the tree like that
and I’m going to get on of the old style spouts. Remember I was telling you
about the wooden spouts, here’s one. That ones just got a small hole in it and
then they went to this type of spout and this is the part that’s going in the
tree and later after those they went to the regular metal and you see the
diameter of that you can see how much bigger around that is, and the health
spout over here you see look at the difference in the diameter and how much of a
smaller hole that you’re putting in the tree plus when we used to drill to put
these spouts in we drilled the hole three inches deep with these we’re only
drilling an inch to 1 ¼ inch deep so you’re doing a lot less stress and
damage on the tree and now we’re going to go this coming year this has been
improved on instead of being plastic it will be a stainless steal spout, not
plastic. Progress is hopefully always being made.
And as I said these lines go out a mile without the four-wheeler, which
you see on the trailer down there it would be a real project trying to take care
of as much tubing I would say that we’ve got 25 to 30 miles of tubing
including the main lines that 5/16 tubing there’s tremendous amounts of it up
there and it has to all be checked and maintained you have to get the limbs off
the trees because every summer there’s limbs and trees that have fallen down
and in the fall I go around checking and remove them to keep the lines in shape
because the vacuum doesn’t work well if you’ve got leaks that’s the big
challenge, is keeping the system tight so you’ve gotta enjoy being in the
woods and doing that kind of work because its not for the guy that wants to
be in the movie theater its for the guy that wants to be up here and be
in the woods it’s a great thing and that’s what I like.
These tanks hold a lot of volume but you know there is really hardly enough storage that’s something that I really have to add to be able to take care of the sap because when the sap really runs that white line it’s a 1 inch line that one has over 1/3 of the taps there are the few times that that will run full stream 1 inch coming off the hill and when you tap with the bucket and you see one drip at a time and then think that you can get enough of that gathered to fill a 1 inch stream its pretty impressive when it gets running these are wire ties that we put around to hold you see the high tensile wire that’s holding the line up there and we put these things on to hold the line up there this is all of the equipment here that we put on the four wheeler the poor old four wheeler is really weighted down I put that on the back and then that goes on the front then I have all the tools and things I need when I’m working on the lines and then I don’t have to run back here to get the parts and the pieces and this is the tool belt that I’ve got here that I use when I’m tapping and these are tools that I use when I’m up here working and this machine here splits all the wood there was a time when we split it all by hand and I’m telling you that’s a job but with this thing you can split wood faster than you can stack it, it’s a nice piece of equipment. We run all this line and that black one is going to the shed and we run a vacuum from that and it always amazes me when I get a mile away I will still have vacuum if I haven’t got leaks and that’s the goal when I don’t have leaks when I get to the far end of the system and still have vacuum and this year we’ve accomplished that.