In my year and a half of caching I have met many people and can even call some of them good friends! In conversation with those friends and even others I am always amazed that most people are unaware of the homemade maple syrup "industry". I have been tapping trees and making syrup for 20 years now and until I discovered caching was never a problem. I spend 2 weeks in Feb. preparing for the season, 4-5 weeks in March collecting and boiling the sap and a week afterwards cleaning up. Because of the need to have a job I only boil on weekends if possible which does not help my caching efforts. This year I have 200 taps out and hope to make 25 gallons of syrup which is what it seems to take to keep my WHOLE family and caching buddies happy! The average gallon of syrup consists of 40 gallons of sap. I can boil 200 gallons of sap in 18 hours to produce 5 gallons of syrup. The perfect conditions are when the temps fall below freezing by around 8pm and the day is sunny and temps in the 40's.Because you need to have certain conditions the sap does not flow every day. I find the syrup hobby to be almost as fun as caching and thought that I would share some knowledege and keep updating with my daily collection totals. Today was not the perfect day but was quite nice. Because this was the first "run" I will be able to cache this weekend!
Todays sap collection total..... 100 gallons!