So, it occurred to me a few weeks ago that, hey, we live in the woods….lots of trees….some of them are bound to be maple….duh….we could make maple syrup! (Mike heard this idea and the first thing he said was “This is YOUR project!”)
I talked to a guy who does this in his backyard, bought 10 spiles (taps) and hooks at the local Agway and waited for the weather to warm to above freezing to get started. On Saturday afternoon, I went out and did a thanking and appreciation ritual to the trees we’d be tapping and began drilling my first hole. After taking a really long time to get very far, the battery died, Mike came out and replaced it, and adjusted the drill to go in the *forward* direction, not reverse, the way I had it. The subsequent trees went so much faster! After we drilled in the holes, we hammered in the spiles, hung up our coffee cans on the hooks (thanks Mike and Nikki!) and four trees later, we were finished. (Mike N. had to show us which ones were maples and we weren’t sure after that point, plus we’d run out of coffee cans.) I didn’t actually feel confident that I would get much since I had no idea of what I was doing, so I was completely amazed to see our sap buckets holding (gasp) SAP today when I went out to check them! The bucket on the tree closest to the driveway was completely full, and the other ones were around halfway full. Mike fabricated a cool filtering system as we poured the sap into the big bucket and sometime soon we’ll be cooking it up. With a ratio of anywhere between 1:20-1:50, we don’t expect to yield much this season, but it’s fun and we’re learning a lot!
Drilling the first hole!
Anything coming out yet?
Surprised and thrilled to actually have sap to pour into our bucket 24 hours later!
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