The food production experiments continue....

So last week, on Saturday, we went to Farbach-Warner nature preserve for their maple sugar festival. Basically it was a small display of the techniques and equipment for tapping trees to collect sap to boil down into syrup, with some treats to taste test. Then there was a short hike into the 'sugarbush' to see some trees that were actually tapped and producing.

One fact stood out to me during the presentation. It was this: all members of the maple family are suitable for tapping, it's just that the sugar maple has this highest sugar content in the sap and therefore yields the most syrup per gallon of sap after evaporating.

I said to myself; "Self, we have that Silver Maple in the back yard that does me very little good and loves to shed branches all year long that I have to clean up, plus the millions of helicopters in the spring. It's about time that it paid me back for not cutting it down."

For those of you wondering what these two facts have to do with one another, I'll tell you: I tapped my Maple Trees. Two of them, three taps in one and two in the other. This is perfectly 'legal' when done according to the guidelines:

1) You can tap a tree that is 10 inches in diameter, and you can add a tap for each additional 5 inches up to three taps on a tree. That's if you want to keep the tree healthy. You could put thirty taps on a tree, but it'll be dead by summer. Maybe I should add some taps...

2) Drill hole in the tree angled upward slightly, and drive in a spile. You can get commercial spiles which are nice because you can hang the bucket from them. My technique was slightly (or significantly) more ghetto: scrounged some CPVC tubing in the basement, cut 6 inch lengths, drove them into the holes I drilled, put a nail in the tree a few inches above the tap, and used nylon cord to suspend mason jars to catch the sap thus:

The time to do this is supposedly when the days are 40 or above but it still freezes at night. The past couple of days have fit the bill, so our sap production is going gang-busters. In the 30 or so hours since the taps went in, I estimate about 5 gallons of sap. It's about 50:1 for sap:syrup, so I'm anticipating about enough syrup for one Saturday morning breakfast. That's if the boiling goes according to plan - no guarantees on that. More reports to come. Fankhauser would be proud.