Sugaring #1

This morning my brother-in-law came over to teach me how to tap maple trees. He had 8 taps, so that was how many trees we targeted. Most of the trees that we tapped were sugar maples, but a few were red maples. I learned that it is best to tap trees over 10 inches, drill at a 30 degree angle upwards and drill in 3-5 inches depending on the size of the tree. You don't want to drill into the heart wood, but you want to drill in far enough to create a pocket for the sap. I found all of this very interesting. We have a huge sugar maple right next to the road, but we didn't want to tap it seeing it is so close and up here you never know who is going to screw around with it.

Greg said in this area we won't get a huge flow because of the sand, but we had a wet fall, so the roots are well hydrated so we'll see. Things aren't flowing yet, the trees are still pretty frozen, but in the next few days as things warm up and we tapped trees on the south slope, they should start flowing soon. From Greg and Darlene's experience a ratio of 14-1 is what they go by when boiling it down, but he said to just go by taste, cause it can get way sweet way fast. We plan on cutting it with some Karo syrup to thicken it up some and help with the "sweet" factor and then try and can it. We could freeze it, but around here with our venison we run out of freezer space and we have a huge root cellar that we can store canned things in.

Here are a couple of pictures from this morning. The kids really got into helping Uncle Greg. Adin already has the taps figured out exactly how they get put in. He is a fast learner.



Tomorrow morning before work, I'll take a hike and see if there is anything of promise in those buckets or anything we need to discard in those buckets. It is nature and you never know what might find it's way into a sap bucket. Maybe if this process all goes well and we all like the product, we'll invest in some more taps and such.