Our first day of 2011 was February 11. The weather has been a bit strange with a whole lot of snow, then suddenly melting.
Michael tumbled all of the taps to clean them up, overall it worked pretty well. Some of the really corroded ones were not great, but we’re looking at new stainless ones designed to work with bags.
We only had one cordless drill, so Dad & Michael went to the woods to tap while Tab & I worked on the shop. First we had to chip ice from in front of both doors to even get them open. That took a while, but we got them open, then used John to push away as much snow and ice as possible so it would not run into the barn when it melted.The tapping crew came back before too long needing a new battery. The new one hadn’t been on the charger long enough, so they were out of business. We decided to put the generator in Francis and drag cords through the woods to finish up. We finished up in another hour or so, and all things considered it didn’t go too badly. We decided to expand in the south woods instead of tapping the north, so at the end of the day we had 142 taps in. Michael tapped at Conti’s the next day, bringing the total to 147. Maybe we need to be on the lookout for a gas-powered drill for next year.
So far Michael is not impressed with the new plastic bag holders. From what he says it’s difficult to get the holder off the spout without pulling the spout out of the tree. Then it’s hard to get the tube back in the bag while putting it back on the spout. I think he’s ready to throw them all away. I haven't had to deal with them yet.
There are still a few trees we could tap in the south woods, but they are a little remote from the others. If we add our normal number to the 147 we have now we would have 11 more in the north woods and 15 on Young’s, a total of 173.
