We made syrup!!! Last weekend, I ended up boiling it too long (I was waiting for it to become the consistency of, well, syrup!) and it hardened in the bottle. Mike reheated it and added a little more sap and measured the temperature very precisely, and got it into a “real” syrup state which we could actually eat the next day for breakfast!
All told, six gallons of sap and around one tank of propane rendered us between 1.5-2 cups of yummy, homemade syrup. With all of the recent warm weather, our snow is melting, which made our sap collection bucket tip over at some point, so we lost 6 gallons back to nature. As spring rapidly approaches, the trees are putting out less and less sap (we’ve been getting up to 2 gallons a day from the four trees we tapped, and this weekend it’s only been a few cups) so our sugaring season looks like it’s ending soon. I’ll boil up the last few gallons we have this week, and then we’ll look ahead to shifting gears and preparing for our chickens!
Pictures of our breakfast feast with our own syrup!
