We spent Saturday outside with the kids, tapping our maple trees. You might remember when we went to Murphy's Landing to learn more about making maple syrup. We did not know then that in one years time, we would be tapping our own trees!
At some point this winter we decided to give it a go and were thrilled to find a cluster of silver maple trees in our woods, as well as many in our back yard. We have tapped twelve trees so far.
Above you can see Rory drilling the hole, placing the tap and gently tapping it in. We used plastic bags with metal rims instead of the traditional bucket.
Tapping a Sugar Maple Tree from Becca Groves on Vimeo.
From the start, our maple sugar flow rate (sap) was about one drop per second. We think it might speed up as the weather gets warmer. The sugar maple sap is basically water: only 1-2% sugar content. It will take several days and maybe weeks to get enough sap to make maple syrup. After we have collected enough sap we boil off the water until it is a high enough sugar content for syrup. It can take 50 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup! Now we know why the stuff is so pricey!
For the boiling process, Rory is building our own wood burning evaporator at the end of our driveway. I promise to document and share the whole process...
3 comments:
We also were interested in tapping our silver maple trees. That is fun you found a sugar maple tree to use at your place! Could you pass along the link for your bags you used to collect the sap?
That is so awesome, Becca!
They were actually hard to find this time of year. Normally Fleet Farm stocks them, but they were sold out so we searched online and found a few websites. LeaderEvaporator.com had what we needed and the prices were reasonable.
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