Retirement Plan To Start Making Maple Syrup In The Spring of 2025
Over the years in my technology job, I would often find myself standing in front of an audience going through a presentation on a particular topic with the goal of identifying a call to action that would provide the audience with a motivation to act on something.
When Charla and I started thinking about this project we had many ideas and many questions that included how long it would take and what would this cost. I set out to create a plan that would collect our thoughts and understand the details of each question. The result is the Sugar Cabane plan. Cabane is the word for Sugarhouse in French.
Much of the plan hinges on the number of maple trees we will have access to. This is refered to as the number of taps. In our case, we have between 850 and 1000 taps. The number of taps dictate the size of the evaporator and the one we need is three feet wide and 10 feet long. This size evaporator will allow us to evaporate the sap we will likely get in a 24 hour period into the concentrate called maple syrup. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.
The sap will come from the trees and held in maple sap holding tanks. The holding tanks will need to hold 1500 to 2000 gallons of sap which we will receive from the trees in a 24 hour period. The evaporator size and maple sap holding tanks dictate the size of the building, or sugarhouse needed. The sugarhouse started out as a shed in my mind, but ended up as a 16'x24' building with an attached wood holding area of 16'x14' and a sap tank holding area of 4'x16'.
The Sugar Cabane plan covers acquiring needed tools and equipment, the building site design, the amount of cement needed, the design of the building rafters, and yes I've reached back to high school math to determine the pitch of a roof. Actually my daughter is in high school so I asked her to calculate this which she did (this helped me conserve some of my brain cells).
In future blogs, I will provide additional slides from the Sugar Cabane plan. However, today we are focusing on the timeline from the start of the project to the first year of producing maple syrup.
The timeline includes drying time for rough cut lumber which we will use to reduce project costs. We need to let the lumber dry otherwise it can be too heavy to handle and a building constructed with wet wood will shrink when it dries and may may not have the structural intergrity required. Additionally, we will be utilizing cedar trees available next to the building site to create the primary support beams for the structure and these need drying time as well. For those living in colder parts of the U.S. you may have experience with burning firewood in your fireplace or wood stove that hasn't been seasoned (allowed to dry) and it doesn't usually burn very well. Hence the need to cut the firewood a year or so before it is needed so it can dry.
The Sugar Lodge plan takes into consideration the amount of time we can spend at the Vermont Sugarbush. Our immediate family is rooted in Pennsylvania and we have children and grandchildren in South Carolina. We have parents, and siblings in Vermont and Kentucky (my beautiful wife is a southern girl) and in retirement we plan on spending time with them.
As the slide shows, next spring (2023) we will have an excavator prepare the site. We will cut 90 9' cedar support beams and purchase the needed rough cut lumber.
In the fall of 2023 we will build the foundation for the sugarhouse. Because the site is remote we will be making the cement ourselves at the site by mixing approximately 300 -- 80 lbs bags of powdered material with water and crushed stone.
I forgot to mention the number of trees we are tapping also dictate the number of cords of wood to boil the water out of the sap to make maple syrup. And that would be about 20,000 gallons of sap to be boiled which will require 10 chords of dry firewood for the 2025 season.
The heavy lift begins in the spring of 2024 with the building of the sugarhouse itself. In the fall of 2024 we will purchase and install the evaporator, holding tanks, vacuum pumps (pulls sap from the tree),
install approximately 6000' of 1" piping throughout the sugarbush and then install about 20,000' of small tubing that goes from tree to tree (laterla lines) and then into the 1' piping.
All of this is to get ready for the 2025 season.
As we were flipping through the Sugar Cabane plan, Charla and I realized this vision isn't a hobby, but a small business. I'm not sure where we (more likely me) crossed the line, but we arrived at where we are today. A call to action in this plan is to figure out how to pay for this project which includes selling some old coins. Ebay -- Vermont Sugar Lodge if you are interested in bidding and a bigger call to action is for me to get a lot more exercise so I'm physically up to the challenge.
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