Maple sugaring experiments
I got interested in maple sugaring a few years ago after buying a property with three very old maple trees on it. but I assumed I couldn’t get any usable syrup out of the trees because they are silver maples and not sugar maples, it turns out you just get a lot less syrup and you have to boil the sap a lot longer but it works fine and tastes great. I am a total newbie but I can’t imagine not tapping for syrup now.
I try to avoid Amazon at all costs, but sometimes there isn’t another option. So I bought a small tapping kit on Amazon and bought some buckets at my local hardware store then did my first tap.
It was surprisingly easy. Just drill a hole and put in the tap, connect the tubing, and collect it in the bucket. That's really about it. Sap is made by pressure when it freezes at night and then goes above freezing during the day. So whenever there is a stretch of that temp variation then it's tap season. I have read that you can tap 8-10 times a year depending on the weather.
How many taps can you use per tree? Here is a rough guideline
Under 20 inches- 1 tap
21-30 inches – 2 taps
31 inches or more – 3 taps
So I have three silver maples on my property and all of them should be able to handle 3-4 taps. I suspect that one of the trees is 100 years old. I wanted to get more “real” taps so I went to Tap my Trees and bought a few items. I have no affiliation to tap my trees, I just wanted to find a small company that did this sort of thing and I wanted to create a relationship with an expert on the topic. They sent me a kit and a book and I got to work.
The first season I attempted was very last minute and without knowing what I was doing I ended up with a gallon of usable maple syrup after all was said and done and I had boiled everything off. Since my Maples have a lot less sugar content I had to boil a lot more off. You want to boil it down so it just sticks to the spoon. I found my ratio to be about 10 to 1, so I need ten gallons of tree sap to make one gallon of usable syrup.
I also bought and read “The Maple Sugar Book” by the famous Helen Nearing and Scott Nearing. It is considered the best book on the topic and it did not disappoint. I will review that book in its entirety in a later post. After reading it I was quite surprised at how much candy and other various products were made with Maple syrup. Talk about healthier than high fructose corn syrup and better tasting. It seems like such a forgotten era in today’s ultra-processed world that you would have honey or maple syrup as your primary sweetener. Maybe some maple candy is a product in So Greens future?
That gallon of syrup lasted a long time and I used it as a sweetener for everything. My tea, my oatmeal just everything. So in theory if I can tap correctly I should be able to get 6-8 usable gallons of syrup and 2-3 would be more than enough for my needs and I can sell off the rest. I can do this without much capital expenses and my materials should last years. I think more people should go back and look at maple sugaring as climate change is making of mess of it up north. Will there be another syrup rush in a new part of the world with the zones changing? Talk about a long-term play. But I would say investing in nature and ecology is a safer bet then any stock or security one could buy.
I even got some fancy containers. Hopefully I can sell some maple syrup at some point in the future.
This year the winter like everywhere else has been unusually hot, but we got a bunch of cold air from the north pole down in Nebraska here and we had a week of -30f lows. It got cold real quick. But within a few weeks, it's freezing at night and thawing during the day so I am giving it a go to do my first tap in Jan.
I also purchased a real evaporator. So in theory I should be able to get the syrup I need for myself quite easily.
I have a dream to buy 5-10 acres in the middle of nowhere, dropping a shipping container on it to homestead, and planting an orchard of sugar maples for taping in 5-10 years. Nebraska due to over farming is going through a desertification as we use up the Ogallala aquifer faster then it can replenish. So trees would be a huge help in retaining moisture and helping the land heal. I bet this could all be done on the cheap if you truly found land that wasn’t farmable. Maybe it's a pipe dream, who knows?
We will see how I do this season with the syrup. The winter has been insanely warm and I got a few taps going already but it's not flowing great yet. My goal this year is to get five total gallons of usable syrup after processing. Last year I got one gallon of usable syrup starting late and not knowing what I was doing. I can sure see why people get obsessed with Maple sugaring. It does seem like nature's gift to us and it’s a gift we can get with little to no ecological footprint.