Originally Posted By: catmandoo
Originally Posted By: sprkplug
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.


Ken you should be dictating this on MP3s so you can write a memoir someday. These memories will be lost unless you old timers record it so we can pass it along to future generations. Those sound like simple, hard working but enjoyable days to me.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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