February 9, 2024
We tapped our sugar maple trees this week and that to me is the moment that Spring officially begins. The sap will run for as long as the temperatures continue to freeze at night, and warm up during the day. It takes the tree about 6 weeks to close off the tap holes we drill. If the sap is still running at that point, we could redrill the holes but that seems a bit unfair. We’ll get what we can in the next six weeks and when the tree shuts us off, we’ll call it a season.
On a good day, each bucket gives us a gallon and a half or so of sap and with 30 taps, we hand collect roughly 50 gallons. That sap then needs to be boiled down to about 5 quarts of syrup. Most of the boiling takes place on our woodfired evaporator, but once it’s down to about 5 gallons we bring it inside to finish boiling, filter, and bottle. It's about 8 hours of boiling from beginning to end.
It will never be a money maker on such a small scale. The bigger operations use vacuum pumps which suck more sap from each tree, use plastic tubing which eliminates the need to hand collect the sap – and use evaporators that are oil fired. One year, I did try the tubing on a couple of trees, and I hated it. Our majestic trees looked like they were hooked up to intravenous tubes - I promptly took the tubing down and put our “old fashioned” sap buckets back up instead. The less plastic in my life, my sight line, and my food the better. There’s more to life than profit, and a lot worse ways to spend the first few weeks of Spring.