Jack Schmidling wrote:

It's that time of year again. We have made maple syrup and sometimes
wine every year since we have lived out here. This year we tapped 23
Silver Maple trees and just started collecting the sap.

I find it odd to see sap being collected with no snow on the ground.

I was 7 years old when I saw syrup being made (and enjoyed the candy
made by drizzling it on the snow) and that early impression has been
with me 66 years. The sap came to the steam shed in vats on sledges.
Lifting the buckets off the spiles and over the edge of the vat was
heavy work. Pulling the sledge was too. I only collected from the near
trees. There were two larger vats on the sledge used to collect from the
more remote ones. That one was horse drawn. Smart horse, too. He would
just walk up to the next bucket and stop, wait until it was back on the
spile, then move on. Any machine that could do that today would be
called a robot.

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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