I’m in Leelanau county, Kevin. A lot of lake effect. Not as much as Gaylord or Mancelona though.
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I’ll take my mud any day! over that white stuff!
Bill that is a lot of snow!
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That’s awesome. Thanks for pics
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Started working on our trails ti get to the maple trees. We want to tap 400 trees this year, just the wife and I. It’s going to be a struggle with all the snow this year. We have double of what our average season snowfall is.
We got a little anxious and tapped 100 trees Friday. We woke up to 0⁰ but warmed up to 41⁰ so we couldn’t resist. It’s going to be too cold next week for the sap to flow.
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Our season is over. I pulled before you even tapped. 
400 with tubes probably isn’t too bad. With buckets, it is a lot more work then i would want to do with two people.
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Our first real run may be Friday. It should be a good weekend for making syrup. The problem is, next week will be too warm unless the forecast changes again for out benefit. If not, it’ll be very poor. We ended up with 350 taps and may only get 10 gallons of syrup. I have over 40 hours and a few hundred dollars clearing snow just to get to the trees. Right now we have about 40 gallons of sap hanging on the trees…frozen solid.
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I got hit with a hard of a freeze like that in the middle of the season, and ended up with a decent season but it took a week or two before it started running again. I do not envy collecting all that by hand that is a lot of work during a good run. 
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We use our side by side with two 55 gallon barrels on the back to collect the sap. We pour it in the buckets on the back, the shorter bucket for the wife. The sap gets filtered as it enters the buckets and gets pumped into the barrels with 12 volt diaphragm pumps. Im still setting this up. I have to run the hoses from the buckets to the barrels. We’ll be collecting tomorrow.
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If you can drive up to the tree that is nice. I have hauled 5 gallon buckets full of sap from 100s of trees probably on average 20 yds away. My body hurts thinking about it. 400 taps is what 1600 gallons or 6 ton of material to haul. I was in shape then, My body hurts thinking about it now.
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Yeah, my back has been bad for 32 years. I make sure we can get to every tree or we dont tap it. This year’s been tough getting to the trees after getting 14’ of snow. The skid steer certainly got a workout.
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We’ve had 3 days in the 60’s and 70’s. The snow is melting fast. I can finally see the sawmill again. I was planning on using it this winter but spent my time keeping up with the snow instead. We’ve had over 14’ which is double the average.
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We had 15’ of snow this winter which is double of our average. Consequently, one of our greenhouses collapsed and bent up all the cattle panels I used to build it. I didn’t want to buy new panels so I straightened the old ones out. I’m surprised how well they turned out. This time I reinforced the inside of the greenhouse so this won’t happen again.
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I was wondering how well those held up given all the snow you got. At least it only happened to one of them. It sounds like you are on the right track.
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Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. We’ve been very busy.
A friend of 30 years came up on Wednesday and took down my solar panels. We had 1040W and he installed 2450W of panels. He also installed an auto start for us so we can leave the homestead and always have power. He also installed a 40A Iota controller for an additional way of charging at 120V.
While he was programming the controllers, I got the charcoal gasifier ready to run a 9000W Harbor Freight generator. My buddy had a huge smile on his face when he saw all the current going into the batteries from charcoal. He is an electrical engineer and installs solar for a living. He taught me some things this week and I was able to teach him something too. I will hopefully make a video next week.
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Neat green house idea- i wounder what it would cost me to build a 8 or 10 wide by 30 foot long green house useing cattle fence panels.? and or is it cheaper that way or did you just have spare cattle fence? THANKS NICE straiten job.
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Each cattle panel is 50" wide and cost me $23 each. The plastic is 6 mil and was $90. I think the lumber cost me $100.
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We had close to 90⁰ this past weekend. I actually put our window AC unit in. Now the past couple of mornings I’ve had to light the wood stove with a small fire in the morning to get the house to 75⁰.
We’re winding down on our markets now. The bugs are thinning out so working outside will be a lot easier.
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Did you have your normal amount of bugs this year Bill? We had a fraction of what we normally get. Not just biting flies and mosquitos but also garden bugs. Of course being paranoid almost from birth I think it’s something the government is putting in the chemtrails.
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We had almost no mosquitoes this year, im sure because it was so dry.
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