If anyone is interested, our end of season tally looks like this:
maple sap boiled...625 gallons.
maple syrup produced...14 gallons.
Average yield....44:1 (approx.)
Wow. As a kid, our family boiled down maple sap. Between our family farms, we had about a 1000 acres in Northern Wisconsin. One of my uncles did most of the collecting with the family's team of Belgian horses and a big sled. My dad did our 80 farm (about 40 acres of woodland) with our Farmall H. I can remember my mother and my aunts boiling day and night.
I have no idea how much sap we collected, and I have no idea how much syrup we produced. It was enough for our family, my dad's seven brother's families, and some extended family.
It was all done on a big wood stove in copper tubs. The stove sure burned a lot of wood because it was in an uninsulated 3-sided run-in barn, when it was still getting well below freezing at night.
I'm surprised anybody can still afford to make maple syrup.
