A yearly tradition that our family started a few years back, is tapping our Maple trees in order to make Maple Syrup. The first year we did it we tapped a few trees, cooked the sap down inside the house (I have since learned this is a big no-no) to accumulate about 1/2 cup of Maple Syrup. It was a fun experience and we really didn’t put much time and energy into it. Well as with most things our family takes on, this has now become a big production with a goal of 3 gallons of Maple Syrup when all is said and done. Now that may not seem like much until you realize that in order to get 3 gallons of maple syrup you need to accumulate 120 gallons of sap. Yes that is true, I didn’t accidentally add a zero. So we have tapped 5 trees, most of which have 2 taps, and the kids have to collect the sap each day. We then store it in a cooler in the garage in order to keep it cold until we can cook it down. The season lasts approximately 3-5 weeks, so we’ll see where that takes us!
As you can see we use our own make shift collection devices (i.e. Wal-mart grape juice containers) to collect the sap. Then on an available day we start a fire and continually add sap, basically for the entire day, until it cooks down enough to bring inside and finish off to syrup.
This year we were limited on available days and so started a fire on a cold, wet day, with cold, wet firewood. As you can imagine, it took awhile to get a good fire going. So once we got it rolling we decided that we were keeping this thing going until we cooked all available sap! So we cooked it for 2 long days. We kept the fire going the first night and my dear husband took the rainy shift that lasted until 4am and included a total downpour. We rigged up a sort of cover to keep the fire and sap free of rain water, but that didn’t do much for my husband who was standing out in the rain tending to the fire at hourly intervals. I took on the 4am and on shift (luckily after the rain stopped) and we managed to get over 1 gallon of syrup!!!! This is very good. Only 2 more gallons to go. We will hopefully have much drier wood to work with on the next appointed sap cooking day, but if not, we’re ready!
This is our newest four-legged addition, Woodroe. He was the only one still awake at 4 am when my shift started. He’s adjusting well.
