#maple tapping

[xipe-slayground]

It's time for Maine Maple Weekend! 🍁

[vargamormusings]

Decided to make some maple syrup recently~

[durotoswrites]

Behold!  Some maple syrup from our second year of maple tapping!  This is less than half of it, and we were able to get the consistency a bit thicker this year.  It’s been my husband’s pet project, and I’m so proud of him!  I’ve helped clean the equipment, and I’m always amazed at how simple the process is for something so rewarding.

I went for a little stroll through our backyard and found lots of new things springing up.  I’m definitely looking into more backyard foraging this year, and I’m so eager to see what I can find.  (Keeping my fingers crossed for those morel mushrooms!)

[durotoswrites]

Maple tapping season is well underway, and we’re hoping to produce even more liquid gold than last year.

Here’s a bit of the final product from last year, but we still have a few gallon jugs of tree sap in the fridge ready to continue boiling down!  It’s been leaving the house smelling like a bakery, and I’m so excited to see how much syrup we get this year!

My husband and I have been excited to try different recipes with the syrup, including spiced mead and maple candy!

We’re planning to make bigger steps towards producing our own food.  I’ll keep y’all updated on the goodies we make and the plants we find and veggies we grow!

[pearls-gone-wild]

🍁 Maple Tapping for Anyone in Possession of a Tree 🍁

So it occurs to me that my original maple tapping post said literally nothing about how to tap maple trees for their fabulous, delicious, sugary maple sap.

Here's what you need:

The correct climate. You need a spell where it goes below freezing at night and above freezing during the day. If you live where potholes and icicles abound, that's prime maple tapping territory.

At least one tree. Any sort of maple tree will do, though sugar maples are best. Tree must be at least 8 inches in diameter; if you're not sure, measure it.

A spile. This is a metal tube that you will insert into the tree to access the sap.

A drill and a drill bit the same size as the spile. Check when you buy the spile(s) what diameter it is. Make sure your drill bit matches. If you don't, you'll be sorry, and possibly so will the tree.

Some sort of food-grade collection receptacle. Buckets are popular! They even sell spiles that you can hang a bucket off of for direct collection. I'm currently using orange juice containers.

(Optional) Food grade tubing, with the same inner diameter as the spile. If you have no place to put the bucket for direct dripping from the spile, you'll want a tube. Even if you do have a good direct drip, a tube can help your setup be windproof. (Yeah, don't forget you start tapping in late January/early February. Wind is still a thing.)

(Optional) A larger food-grade collection receptacle. This would be for storing your growing sap collection. Remember, the boiling ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1.

A reasonable evaporation setup. I'll talk more about this later.

A final receptacle for the syrup. You can use literally anything. Heck, you can filter your maple syrup directly onto your pancakes if you want. You totally don't need to go online and learn all the names of different bottle shapes and after relentlessly hunting for exactly the right bottle with a maple leaf embossed on it. But I did.

Ok now what:

Drill a 1.5 inch hole into the tree. You just need to get a little bit past the living tissue of the tree, but no deeper. Drill at a slight upwards angle to help the sap drip out.

Gently tap in the spile. Use a soft hammer, or a regular hammer behind a piece of wood. You just want the spile in enough so it stays, but you don't want to split the tree, or bend the spile.

Set up the collection bucket. Use the tubing or whatever is necessary. Keep the top covered to avoid also collecting dirt, bugs, rain, or snow.

Check your bucket and pour off the sap as it fills. If you're not boiling right away, store it someplace chilly; this is basically sugar water and it will growth very happy bacteria and fungi if left out.

So about the part where you actually make syrup- this is the part where it gets either expensive or labor-intensive or both. Your evaporation options are:

Stovetop. You can boil down your sap into maple syrup on your stove if you like, but it requires time and a very good stove vent, because this produces crazy quantities of steam (40:1 remember?). I do this, but i do this knowing that I'm one day going to have to buy a new stove vent to replace the one entirely clogged with maple candy.

Outdoor evaporator. So the commercially available "evaporator" is a bit of an oversell. Mostly these are large metal pans, underneath which you light a fire, which burns for, oh, days, while the syrup is being made. This is usually a rural hobby, so think hard about your environs before you light outdoor fires.

Sugar shack. If you're hard core about this, and have the location for a sugar shack, sure, go ahead and build an outdoor structure just for making maple syrup, which you're evaporating with wood you chopped yourself. 🪓🪵 Go ahead and laugh at my little cook pot boiling for 12 hours, I'm married to a Vermonter, I'm used to it.

General advice:

If you still have questions on how to do this, Google is your friend. So is the University of Maine and the University of Vermont, and endless charmingly middle-aged forums.

(This is the only hobby I've taken up that hasn't followed me around the Internet in the form of ads, which is all you need to know that it's not an expensive hobby.)

Do not tap trees that you do not have a right to tap. This is called guerilla tapping, and is frowned upon. My Vermonter is vague about what happens to guerilla tappers, but my sense is that it's nothing that finds its way into a Robert Frost poem.

My first batch of maple syrup. 🥰🍁🥞

[pearls-gone-wild]

Hobbies rated on a scale of 0-10 based on how much the ads are going to follow you around the Internet:

Ethnic cooking: 7/10. Look, you don't really have the time or ability to copy your grandmother's chili sauce, but we have it in this jar.

Quilting: 4/10. You're probably dedicated to your local quilt store, but just in case you fall in love with a print they don't have, we can ship it to you.

Ultra-light backpacking: 6/10. You clearly want the best and latest in over-engineered gear for living in the woods for a week. Also, here is a lot of prepper equipment!

Funky jewelry: 12/10. ✨ OMFG YOU WANT THESE SPARKLIES NOW ✨💎📿 LOOK WE PUT YOUR FANDOM IN A PENDANT ✨

Gardening: 9/10. You want these seeds. Also these pretty flowers. And these improbably colored tomatoes. And this grow light

Maple Tapping: 0/10. You sure about this? You know this requires wading through snow while hauling gallons of mildly sweetened water, which then has to be boiled down to 1/40th original volume, right? Ok... just don't hurt the trees, ok?

On the upside, all Google searches for maple tapping get you to exactly the information you wanted, often inside charmingly under-edited videos and 1990s-style message boards full of people trying to avoid buying a $30 hydrometer.

[pearls-gone-wild]

So I live in New England, which is one of those places where people are really, really proud of how cold it is. New Englanders like to give the impression that they're tougher than and morally superior to you because they're immune to the cold that they choose to live in.

This is complete and utter bullshirt. New Englanders get just as depressed in the wintertime as any other right-thinking mammal without the option to hibernate. The secret of people who continue to live in New England, vs. those who grab a degree and promptly skeedaddle someplace where your face doesn't hurt for 3 months of the year, is that they develop coping mechanisms.

Popular New England winter coping mechanisms include:

Wondering where all the snow is, and blaming climate change

Cussing the large quantity of snow that's befallen you, and blaming climate change

Looking forward to climate change, because then it won't be so cold

Snickering when it snows someplace south of the Mason-Dixon line and no one shows up for work except the female legislators

Maple tapping

Because the dang weather at least gets us trees that make sugar. Maple sap runs on those freeze/thaw days that also produce icicles and potholes, all the potholes, but let's focus on the maple syrup.

So in March of 2021, I lose my mind and decide to make my own maple syrup. It doesn't matter that I'm living in the suburbs and am the legal owner of maybe three maple trees. You see

It's March of 2021, the pandemic has been going on for a year, and I need to take my mind off waiting for the vaccine

My immigrant family knew death by starvation as recently as my grandparents' generation, so I can't just leave calories unharvested

We live in the magical age of internet enablement and I can have all the necessary supplies in less than a week

I really like maple syrup

Within 48 hours I have a head full of maple-tapping instructions from the University of Maine and a handful of spiles. It isn't until I start looking for the correct size of drill bit that my husband, legal co-owner of said trees, realizes I'm serious.

Him: You're going to do this? Tonight?

Me: YES.

Him: There are no leaves. Are just going to drill all the trees and hope some are maples?

Me: I remember what we rake.

Him: Do we even have sugar maples?

Me: Doesn't matter. Any maple sap will make syrup.

Him: How did you get spiles?

Me: Amazon.

And now my husband is looking at me with a very special look on his face, because not only is he from Vermont, maple syrup capital of the United States, he grew up in the middle of the woods, not a single tree of which has ever been tapped to make maple syrup because my in-laws just aren't into that. But maple tapping was totally a thing that everyone else did, and the look he's giving me says, more clearly than wedding vows, "Okay, fine, I'll help."

So at 10 PM on a Friday night, we tromp across our very suburban lawn, and start drilling into trees and hoping the neighbors can't hear me giggling, "Yeah, I'd totally tap that." And we get maple sap! But because we start so late in the season, and because maple sap makes syrup at a 40:1 ratio, we end up with about two tablespoons of maple fudge (I over-evaporated). I am ecstatic, and feel like I'm upholding the honor of ancestors who wrested calories from stern Nature, rather than the shelves of Market Basket, though I am well aware that many of said ancestors would probably roll their eyes and ask why I want to do things the hard way.

But the point is, I now have something to look forward to during the New England winter. The weeks ago, I pulled out the spiles and collection jugs and as we speak, I'm getting my tree sugar. 🌳🍁🥞

(This is the total maple syrup I got last year. It was delicious.)

[durotoswrites]

It’s tapping season!  This is our first season tapping the maple and black walnut trees in our backyard.  I know it probably doesn’t look like much, but I’m so excited to do this.  We’ve got gallons of the sap boiling down and the kitchen smells like a candy shop.  It probably won’t make very much in the end, but it’s delicious so far!