I guess this is how blogging goes when you're doing intense seasonal operations like mapling and sea-salting. Last blog was near the start of maple season (four months ago), and the sap was filling the tanks -- exciting -- operations about to go full tilt and ... pretty much the end of my ability to focus on blogging -- just too busy and wiped out at the end of each day for the next six weeks. Now we're 6 weeks into sea-salt production, a week from Summer solstice -- and the salt works are cranking out salt. Always something more to do to catch up or at least not get even further behind. No complaints -- just leaves little energy for talking about it in blog world. But lets try.
2018 Maple Season: Was very good in its own peculiar way. Never any really big sap runs -70- just steady runs almost everyday from mid-February until the end of March. Basically had the evaporator going everyday for six weeks. Sap weather was never great -- never quite cold enough but never too warm either with one early season 70 F day exception. By April 1st, we made a bit over 100 gallons of syrup -- which makes it one of our best seasons of the last decade. So Yay!
2018 Salt Season: Got things up and started here at the Pariah Dog Farm in Teaticket the last week of April. As usual started by working on the "winter brine" -- bringing it down to salt-ready condition (about 25% salt concentration). Winter's freezing operations gets the brine to about 10% Salinity or a loss of 80% or more of its initial water. But I need the solar and warmer conditions of mid/late Spring to concentrate it further and to "salt off." I've expanded my works in capacity quite a bit this year, and so its been fairly intense. Began actual salt production about 3 weeks ago now -- with very few roof-down days (rainy days) -- so its full bore as usual as solstice approaches. Once the "winter brine" is all brought to salt (probably within next month), things will slow down a tad -- as there is more of a wait between batches as it takes a while to evaporate 100 gallons of raw seawater down to salt (about 10-12 days during July and August).