Sunny, breezy and beautiful. Gauzy cloud, turquoise horizon and a with a high of 60F.
Daily Catskills: 03/30/21
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Monthly Archives: March 2021
Daily Catskills: 03/29/21
Gusty winds, bright sunshine, but freezing. A high of 41F and a light dusting of morning snow on the very peaks. Gushing streams.
Daily Catskills: 03/28/21
Rain beginning early morning and continuing all day. Overcast with a high of 54F and windy.
Daily Catskills: 03/27/21
A high of 58F, humid and breezy with billowing clouds. We’re getting some beautiful light this Spring in the Catskills.
Daily Catskills: 03/26/21
A balmy morning with fog on the peaks and misty rain. Blustery winds tossing leaves like confetti and thunderous clouds passing in a hurry. A high of 71F. Moody.
Daily Catskills: 03/25/21
After a whole day’s rain comes a misty sunrise and a balmy Spring day with a high of 70F.
Daily Catskills: 03/24/21
Overcast with rain beginning mid-morning and continuing for the rest of the day. A high of 50F. A humid and soggy day with mist rising off the rivers. After a brief period of dryness, mud season kicks off.
Maple Boiling
The sap began to flow at the end of February – 27th – when temperatures rose briefly. Now it’s flowing intermittently when temperatures rise during the day. Equipment is still freezing up overnight and has to be shut down while the lows are in their twenties: 21F, 24F and 29F, but it was 39F last night.
Maple syrup is highly processed, requiring complicated equipment for each stage of production: sap is drawn from the trees through tubing with a vacuum system; the sap is then passed through a reverse osmosis machine that removes water and makes the sap more concentrated. (This process produces purified water called permeate.) The sap is then boiled to about 220F, then clarified through a filter press. The boiling point varies with atmospheric pressure.
The amount of sap that each tree produces depends on the girth of the tree. Each tree makes roughly one quart of finished syrup. One gallon of syrup will start life as roughly 42 gallons of sap this year, the ratio being dependent on how sweet the sap is. The sugar content (measured in degrees Brix: one degree of Brix is one gram of sucrose per 100 grams of solution) of the sap now running is 2%. Tree Juice Maple Syrup has two sap bushes: the Red Kill sap bush has sweeter sap than the Rider Hollow sap bush, which has more red maple than Red Kill. If enough sap flows on a warm day, boiling continues all day and night until the collection tank – 6300 gallons – is empty.
The final product is subtly sweet, not overwhelmingly so, and tastes smooth and earthy: nature’s amber nectar.
Daily Catskills: 03/23/21
A warm, sunny morning quickly warming up to a high of 64 by mid-afternoon. Some green is emerging amidst the flaxen landscape.
Daily Catskills: 03/22/21
Three days of continuous sunshine is putting the spring in our Spring. A high of 62F in the valley. Mostly clear and sunny with a low of 29F. The last of the winter snow keeps the rivers high.
Daily Catskills: 03/21/21
28F by mid-morning rising to a high of 61F and mostly clear skies.
Daily Catskills: 03/20/21 Spring Equinox
First day of Spring, the Vernal Equinox with equal duration of day and night. A gorgeous day in the Catskills, high of 51F, balmy in the sunshine, breezy, and clear with a pink-orange sunset. Snow still lingering in the shadows. A serene start to the season after a winter of near-constant snow.
