It’s maybe a little hard to see, but this is the first drop of sap for the 2014-15 Winter Maple Sugar Season here at our little homestead! Yah! It’s a fun thing to do… a little messy when you are boiling it down, but fun, none the less. And you end up with beautiful lovely syrup and sugar!!! From your own trees! It’s kind of the closest thing to magic I can think of.
It’s really quite easy. First off, you need a couple nice big sugar maples. We happen to have about 10 of them. Maybe 9. At least tappable. You should make sure they are at least a foot around before you tap one. At least that is what we were told. A tap for every foot is a good starting point. Our old maple by the pump is HUGE so we do three on it. Most of our other trees we do two. Seems to produce plenty of good tree sap for us and our needs.
We got our taps (or styles for the proper name) off eBay! Honest. They are a super hard plastic and seem to work pretty darn good. I know you can be a purist and use only the metal ones, but they were a little more pricey and all. These work good and this is our third year using the same ones. You attach a piece of hose to the end and with a little drilled hole and a tap in, you are ready to be sugaring! Or well, at least draining sap!
Maggie drilled a hole in each clean 5 gallon bucket, just tight enough for the tube to go in rather tightly. Don’t want icky stuff to get in the lovely sap. You are supposed to drill upward at a slight angle. Maggie was getting ready to angle but I snapped the picture too quick! A slight upward angle helps to encourage dripping downwardly into the tap and hose.
Look! Our first bit of sap! It does flow fairly well. First two years we used milk jugs, but they were kind weird and difficult to attach to the trees. And they filled up fast. We had to check every day, sometimes twice a day! With the five gallon pails, we hope that won’t be the case. Still, I’m pretty sure we will get quite a bit of sap. Every good sized tree during the sap run can easily be milked of 20 to 30 gallons of sap! Sap runs good when the days are above freezing, but the nights are cold and a little below freezing. Like, right now!
There is more to sugaring for sure, but it’s really not that hard. We only had three buckets so we just did the one tree. I’m going to see about getting a couple more tomorrow in town and we will probably tap a couple more trees. It’s always cool!
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