Just stacked in the last of some hemlock and a black birch that fell in the wind earlier this year into the stack for the maple arch. Puts me at about three cord ready to go for making syrup. Two cord has been stacked for over a year so it’s pretty dry. I’d like to get another cord done and stacked before the sugarig season starts next year. Got my eye on a couple other standing dead hemlocks out back. Between the arch stack and our house wood I’m feeling happy. First time since I bought our house four years ago that I’ve felt a little ahead with firewood. Got nine cord of mixed hardwood stacked and ready to go for the house. Five of it is two years seasoned. Been burning morning and night for a couple weeks now. Sugar shack rebuild is almost done... Been a solo project that I started back in June. Couple hours an evening here and there makes for a crawl of a pace. Feels like it’s just dragging on and on and on. Got a few more shingles to slap on, finish the cupola, side it with some rough cut from the mill up the road, throw on the old barn doors and blow through the roof with the smoke stack. Looks like we have a chance for 6” of snow on Thursday night into Friday. I’m so ready for snow ... but I need to finish this shack first! At least I’m ahead with firewood.
Wow can you post a few more pics/details about that sugar shack??? I have been sugaring (strictly as a hobby) for past 3 years, I'd love to build something very similar and get myself a better evaporator. Yours looks perfect for a small scale operation! What's the dimensions of it? And how many taps do you typically set?
Like the sugar shack. Blstr88 you might also contact wishlist who build a nice sugar shack and new evaporator. He is very knowledgeable in this area. He just doesn't know how to split wood worth a hoot.
Very nice Woodsman , I like the cupola as well . Couple things ..... 1. Call it a sugarhouse not a sugar shack , you’ll be spending alot of time inside and besides a sugarhouse sounds much better . 2. You’ll find that depending on which way the wind blows the doors will need to be opened/closed as needed to keep the steam out 3. Backwoods Savage has never ever read his manual on splitting wood , his splitter must be broke dang thing still points to the sky .
Thanks all. Thanks for the tips, Wishlist. The dimensions are 16 x 12. Walls are 8 foot height. Height of the cupola is 15 feet. Roof is 8/12. The lumber was all repurposed from an old sugar shack that I took down at a friends house. He didnt want it anymore and was going to rip it all down and bring it to the dump. So we took it apart piece by piece and trailered it over. The OSB wall boards and the decking and some of the lumber for the porch is all new. Shed sits on five 16 foot long 4 x 4s that are on top of a 9” deep pad of crushed stone. Stone pad is framed out with 4 x 6s. Spent a year hemming and hawing about how to handle the base. Would have liked to sink cement pillars but it’s nothing but ledge and rocks here. Typical New England. Digging out the base was hard enough. This season we will have 210 taps on 3/16ths tubing with the potential to add in an additional 50 if our setup keeps up and then 34 trees will be on buckets below the house. We run an old homemade 2 x 8 arch that holds a 2 x 6 pan. Last year we tapped 140 trees and the arch kept up just fine. We will see how the additional trees go this year. Our maple project for next summer will be building and RO unit so if 250 trees ends up being a little much for our setup, hopefully that’ll be a good solution. This will be my fifth year overall making syrup and second year producing at a larger scale for sale. Started small tapping just a few trees and it’s been growing ever since. Check out our farm page on Facebook or our website: Mount Kadam Forest Farm LLC www.mountkadamforestfarm.com
Wow looks great! 210 taps is a lot more than I do, last year I think I had about 30...so like I said, Im very small scale. We have 40-acres but not a ton of accessible maples unfortunately. A big chunk of the property (20-acres or so) is forested but doesn't have any roads/trails going through it at all...so while I can walk around it I can't drive any equipment in to collect sap with in the late winter. So Im forced to only tap trees that are along our 1200' long driveway. Luckily theres a bunch of monster sugar maples that are very easily accessed! But not nearly enough for anything at your scale. Do you only tap sugar maples? Or any/all maples that are big enough?
Looking good Woodsman , Something that I see way to often is people go cheap on the stack . Single wall pipe run straight thru and out the roof. No clearance to combustibles at all . Sugarhouse burns down ! Our stack temps on the evaporators are way higher than what you would see in the house stoves . My evaporator takes 12” pipe and I ran Class A right from the translation piece all the way out . I also run a 400 cfm forced air blower so stack height isn’t important.
Stopped down to the lumber mill a few miles down the road last week and ended up going home with a full truck load of older rough cut boards for siding for pretty darn cheap. Stuff is beautiful. Smoke stack left to do and then done.
Sugars and reds 12” DBH and greater. 82% of the trees on our lines are sugars. With the red maples, we didn’t notice much of a drop in sugar percentage of our sap last year compared to what others were saying they were getting.
@Bistr88 it sounds like you and I have a similar sized maple operation. I'll run 40 to 50 taps on the reds we have here. Some down in the swamp are easy to get to...until the ice gives out. A lot of times I pull those taps early.
