How to make maple syrup. Part One: Tap the tree.

No.

I don’t mean knock on it. It won’t answer the door and lend you a cup of maple syrup. Like most things agricultural, making maple syrup involves a lot of sweat and quite a lot of violence. My friends who used to live in trees might want to look away now.

First, find a tree.

This is a big, beautiful tree. There aren’t many big trees in ‘our’ sugarbush, so the ones we have are pretty special. This is the ‘Queen Tree’, and she’s the only tree we put three buckets on.

There are various ways to tell if it’s a maple I won’t go into here, but it’s probably worth noting that if it’s standing in a forest surrounded by other maples, it’s still worth checking. Every year I tap an oak or a basswood just because when I’m tapping out I’m cold and tired and fail to look up at the damn tree.

Having found a tree, now you measure your tree:

 

The Wildfarm sugarers are very conservative about the size of the trees they tap.  12 inch (30cm) diameter – 1 bucket. 18 inch (45cm) – 2 buckets. This is substantially bigger trees and less buckets than most sugaring operations use. If Slater can hug a tree and just get his fingers to touch, it’s a two bucket tree. I’m shorter so I use a piece of string with two knots in it  – first knot, one bucket. Second knot, two buckets.

 

After you’ve lugged all your buckets up to the sugarbush and selected your trees, go around and casually lob the buckets to the base of the trees you’re going to tap. Add a lid and you’re nearly there.

You want the buckets to be 18-36 inches off the ground (you’re going to be collecting them by hand for weeks, and anything lower or higher will make a heavy bucket difficult to pick off the tree). The only problem with this is there’s so much snow up in the bush right now that I’m sure there’ll be LOADS hanging halfway to mars when it melts.

Drill a hole 1.5 to 2 inches into the tree. You want your hole angling very slightly downwards. If it’s horizontal, or, worse,  slightly up, then it will fill with sap. When the sap is running this is fine, but as soon as the temperature drops below freezing the sap will just sit in the hole. The sap will go a bit off, which isn’t particularly good for your syrup, but nastiness in the hole will cause it to start to heal. You want the sap to drip out and away from the tree as fast as possible. Clean sap, clean wound.

After you make your hole, clean it out with a twig. Then hammer the spout in until you can’t wiggle it any more.

Hang your bucket and repeat 300 times!

Slater and I can put in about 30 taps an hour in ideal conditions – if the buckets are laid out already and if it’s not too cold or wet – numb fingers make the whole thing take longer and, if it’s wet the whole thing can get very uncomfortable. The weather during tapping was just about perfect this year though – sunny, with the days starting out cold and warming up nicely without getting too slushy.

We have more buckets up this year than we’ve ever had – 330, which is about the limit that two people can gather and boil. Some would say more than two people can do, but as we’ve never had this many buckets up before, ask me about that in two weeks.

The buckets are up, the lines to bring the sap down to the saphouse are laid, the firewood is stocked and everything is washed, laid out and ready. All we need now are the trees to start running and we’re off!

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