The Great Tubing Expansion of 2021
After not breaking anything during our first year of selling tree sap from our sugar bush in Walden VT, we decided to install more sap tubing. We chose to run more lines instead of jumping into sugar house construction during the summer of 2021. This was a thought-provoking decision for us because without a sugar house for the upcoming sugaring season, we would have no where to boil our own sap. We really wanted to boil our own, precious tree sap. After all that was the point of buying land in the first place!
“By tapping more trees and selling more sap we would be accessing the very thing that pays us as sap sellers; the sugar in the tree trunks”
My home made tubing spool.
Installing more sap lines meant we would be selling the sap for another season but we would be selling much more of it. We only had one maple season of numbers to crunch to figure out the economics of this plan but in theory it seemed like the smart thing to do. By tapping more trees and selling more sap we would be accessing the very thing that pays us as sap sellers; the sugar in the tree trunks. There is an old saying among sugar makers: “you make your money in the woods and spend it in the sugar house.” This could not be more true! So that was it, we placed a massive tubing order from our friends at CDL, coordinated with a professional tubing installer to help me with the layout of the lines through the forest and I started doing some stretches because I knew it was going to be a long summer.
The tubing arrived and dwarfed the pile we had received the year prior. We got the layout of the tubing planned and got to work. The tubing also included a vacuum line and a pump line that would attach into a remote pump station. Most of the new tubing would feed into the pump station. Then the sap would be pushed to the road tank where it would be loaded into the tanker truck that comes to get our sap. A simple enough plan but I certainly felt some anxiety about it. I had only briefly looked over another set up that was similar in design and now I was spending money and building my own, I hoped it was going to work!
The first thing to be done was the running of the wet/dry lines, the 1” lines and the wire that supports them. I found this to be challenging for a couple reasons. First, I had constructed a homemade spool that I could unwind the wire and tubing off of. It worked OK at best. Secondly, I ended up borrowing an actual tubing spool but I only had it for a short time. This meant I had to pull the tubing and wire uphill instead of spend the time to get the spool to the top and pull downhill. Pulling 800-1000 feet of tubing through the woods and uphill is extremely hard work, I was only getting an inch or two with each tug. All in all a little over 20,000 feet of mainlines were installed over the summer.
The next part involved the running of all the lateral lines. These are the lines that go to each and every maple tree. Lateral lines deliver the sap from 3-5 maple trees to the main line. This work is not as physically hard as running mainlines but it is very time consuming and monotonous. I single handedly installed a little over 55,000 feet of lateral tubing to a few thousand maple trees. It took me a couple weeks.
Huge Collection of mainlines coming together and joining the wet/dry system.
The next step was to attach all those lateral lines into the main lines. This involves drilling a hole in the mainline with a special tool, installing a saddle then attaching the laterals to the saddle. So, off I went through the woods with a bucket of saddles, my drilling tool, extra fittings and the stainless nuts that hold the saddle on the mainline. I poked along for a little less than a week to get all these installed. I was getting there, I was nearing the last step of the tubing install; the splicing of the drop lines.
A drop line is the piece of tubing that extends off the lateral a few feet at each tree and goes to the spout that is placed in the tree. Every drop line needed a tee fitting placed in the end of it so it could be spliced into the lateral line with another super expensive and specialized tool. My daughter and I spent months of free time putting thousands of tees into drop lines. We then bundled the drop lines together into batches of 100 and zip tied them together. I made special drop line holders out of 5” PVC pipe that was attached to a belt so I could carry them through the woods. This invention actually worked good, better than my mainline spool. I clunked my way around all the tubing with my PVC pipes dangling off of me. This was my third lap around the tubing network and I would not have to do it again until I was tapping the trees in the spring.
ATV loaded up with support posts.
It was nearing the end of September now and I still had lots of work to do. The 1” lines had to attach into the wet/dry lines with something called a whip manifold. The wet/dry lines had to go through a metal shipping container and attach to a releaser. The whole pump station had to be plumbed. All the mainlines had to be wire tied to the support wire. I had to add support posts to the pump line and all the wet/dry lines. The support posts had to be cut from pole sized trees on the property and placed every 10 feet or so along the lines. All of this work took me right up until it was time to start tapping the trees in mid February. I got it done. I don’t know how but I did.
Tree tapping took place in a few feet of snow. I soon realized that doing it by myself on cross country skis and snowshoes was no way to go about business. It was insane and was not a sustainable approach, it was killing me. I needed a vehicle to carry me, my tools, my spare parts, my saw and my food out into the far reaches of the woods. I also needed man power help to get every tree tapped.
One morning around 4 while on Craigslist I found the ATV I needed. It was in great shape and offered at a fair price. That night after making some arrangements during the day I was on the other end of Vermont buying the machine of my dreams and loading it onto a borrowed trailer! I also arranged for our sap buyer and his tapping crew to give me hand tapping my sugar woods. In two days my woods were tapped and I was elated! I could now take a breather after many months of toil.
Soon after getting the woods tapped the weather did its thing! It rose above freezing during the day. This warmth caused the tree’s wood to expand. As the wood expanded, negative pressure was created inside the vascular tissues in the sap wood. The negative pressure pulls freshly thawed sap through the tree and out our tap holes it drips. It drips into the dropline then into the lateral line where it meets sap from 3-5 other trees. After the lateral it flows through the saddle into the 1” line where it meets sap from hundreds of other trees. It follows the 1” line until it flows into the wet/dry line where it meets sap from thousands of trees.
The season was good in a few ways. The weather cooperated and allowed for a lot of sap to be produced. All of our new sap gathering equipment worked as planned. The season was a record-breaking season here in Vermont. The state produces over 2.5 million gallons of maple syrup! We did our small part to help contribute to that total and we are proud of that. We pulled off a great season in our little sugar bush in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and we hope to do it again next year!
