It Was the Best of Years, It Was the Worst of Years
2023 was our first sugaring with lines. We mapped our sugar woods for the first time, ran lines for the first time, and didn’t have to collect sap from buckets for the first time! Oh, glory. On our Mini-Sportman Evaporator, we made 20 gallons of 100% pure maple syrup from exactly 100 sugar maple trees over the course of about a 6 week season!
In 2024 we screwed everything up. We ran the Rookie Evaporator for the first time and made 10 gallons with 200 taps. The first run of sap tasted like plastic so we dumped it. We left some sweetened sap in the pan for too long when it was too warm and it got ropey so we dumped it. The last run of sap made an odd tasting syrup, so we dumped it . . .
2025 is going well so far. We’ve made almost 9 gallons on our Rookie in 3 days from those same 200 taps and counting as of the writing of this post (mid-March).
After Season Cleanup
We’ve also had different experiences with end-of-season clean up. In 2023, we flushed the lines with bleach and saw pretty bad squirrel damage. In 2024, we let the lines hang and had no squirrel damage. Whether to flush your lines is one of those choices only you can make. That’s the executive summary. Here’s what we discovered in detail. (And by “we,” I mean Justin McCabe, inventor of the Sapling Evaporator.)
Kate: Justin, tell me about your end of season clean up.
Justin: I pull taps mid-April just a few days after our maple syrup season ends. I simply pull the plastic taps out of each tree and cut a bit off the drop line just below the tap.
If flushing, I connect the open end of the drop line to the extra prong on the T-plug. If not, I let the line hang free.
When I get home, I put the taps in a pot, fill it with water, and heat it to a boil. This makes it easier for me to pull the bit of line off the tap. Also, I use a pipe cleaner to clean the gunk I could see out of the taps.
The year we flushed lines, I went back right at the beginning of May, a few weeks later. I used a weak bleach solution appropriate for general sanitation: 1/3 cup Chlorox bleach to 1 gallon of water. (If you don’t have the Cholox brand, you can follow CDC recommendations instead.) Because we had 100 lines at the time, I bought a cheap backpack weed sprayer, put the solution in the tank and walked around the sugar woods. I followed some advice I found online and made 2 gallons of bleach solution. I only ended up needing 1 gallon for 100 taps.
I disconnected each drop line from the T-plug and filled up the drop line with the bleach solution until the solution started running into the lateral line, and then I put the open end of the drop line back on the T-plug. I wore gloves to protect my hands and tried not to let any of the bleach solution get outside of the line. Squirrels like the taste of bleach (salty!).
I then went back in November to flush each drop line with clean water, and use enough water so that the lateral lines flush down to the main tank, which I then rinsed and dumped. According to the folks at Proctor, you don’t have to flush out the bleach solution, but, if you don’t, your first syrup will taste salty. But it’s not poisonous to eat, apparently. Wierd!
The year we didn’t flush lines, I only made that one trip into the woods.
Kate: What do you bring with you into the woods?
Justin: Tube cutters, my tapping hammer with spile remover, a bring together hook and extra unions to repair damage to the lines, a baggie for the taps, and, the year we flushed, a backpack weed sprayer full of 2 gallons of bleach solution. (If I had 25 taps or less, I probably would have just used a syringe or turkey baster and a small bucket of the bleach solution instead of investing in the weed sprayer.)
Kate: How long does it take you?
Justin: Each trip into the woods took me about 1 1/2 hours the year we flushed lines. The next year, when we had 200 taps, I took one, 2 hour trip into the woods.
Kate: Where did you learn how to pull taps and flush lines? Where can people go for more information?
Justin: The resource I used most was a YouTube video made by the Proctor Maple Research Center. It’s long but well worth watching. (I also read a lot on mapletrader and elsewhere online, where there is probably both good and bad information.)
Kate: How does process compare to cleaning up after a bucket maple syrup operation?
Justin: Either way, this is way easier than 100 buckets would have been! I probably spent longer breaking down our 50 buckets operation a few years ago than I did breaking down our 200 taps last year. With buckets, you have to remove them from the tree, transport them out of the woods, rinse them, dry them, and then put them away. Lines are easier once they are up.
Kate: What would you do differently next time?
Justin: If I was flushing, I’d pull taps and flush lines all in one go instead of taking two trips into the woods. And I’d recruit a helper; two people could cut the time in half, obviously.
I’d also bring a watering can full of water to rinse the outside of the droplines after I put the bleach solution in them. I bet a good rinse would have helped make sure there wasn’t any residual bleach on the outside of the lines for the squrrels to feast on.