No Sugaring This Year

The family has decided to forgo the Sugaring season this year.  We have much to much snow and we still have about 3/4 of the syrup that we canned last year left.  Time to give the trees a year off, they deserve it after this winter.

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.

Logging

Today as the sun shone and the temp was a beautiful 35 degrees, Scott and I both had the day off as well as tomorrow. Yeah! That doesn't happen much. We started clearing out some trees to make room off of the south east end of our shed "barn" for the chicken coop and the greenhouse. It was so nice to be back out cutting in nice weather. Most of this was green wood so we won't burn it until next year. The kids were out playing in the snow and the play set and also doing some sledding until the snow got too wet and sticky.

On one of trips through the woods with the 4-wheeler the kids and I noticed a spot where an owl came down to try and grab something. The kids thought it was the coolest thing ever. The last time I saw a print like that was about 10 years or so ago when we were raising Guinea Hens at camp and an owl came down and swiped one of those. I actually saw that in progress.

Yesterday I started thinking about tapping maple trees. It was about this time last year that we were talking with Greg, Scott's brother about it and we were a bit late (spring came much earlier last year). I think we are right about on time to start getting this processed prepped and ready to go. I have never done this and neither has Scott, but Greg has, so I gave him a call this afternoon and he is coming over tomorrow to check things out. He also said he was looking for something to do, he's retired now. :)

I also am the proud new owner of a turkey fryer which we are planning on using to boil down the sap to syrup. It is brand new (to us and actually never used but is about 8 years old now) and I am ready to try out this new adventure. Not a bad score for a few hours of computer work for a friend. I have heard that a good tap can produce 5-8 gallons of sap a day, I'll be interested to see how much ours will produce. We have a ton of nice maples in the bottoms out behind our house. If it take 30-40 gallons of sap to make about 1 gallon of syrup, I'm glad that we have a lot of trees. It would be cool to get enough to make enough syrup for us and Greg. Now I just have to do some research on the best way to go about long term storage of the maple syrup.