It's just about time for the Dynamite Household to engage in our inagural batch of Maple Syrup production. We inherited a bunch of tools for the job, and bought some simple additional enhancements. Thus far, the most difficult task may be identifying which trees are maples (not as easy as it sounds in the winter when there are no leaves on the trees, and you've spent the last 10 years living in New York City). I've been looking for the opposite branching characteristic - but if any readers have other tips, or other hints for sugarin' in general, please do leave me a comment.
So far, we have:
buckets & covers
sap tanks
spigots & hooks
evaporating pans
hydrometer & cup
skimmer
glass bottles & caps
stovepipe & cinder blocks for fabricating an evaporator
filtering felt
My concern is with sterilizing things - obviously, the sap boils for an extended period of time, but do I need to dip the bottles in boiling water? How about the caps? We weren't sure if we should wash the caps because they have those little paper seals inside them. We already ran the bottles through the dishwasher. How clean do the evaporating pans needs to be?
If any of my readers have made maple syrup from scratch before and have any tips, please let me know. My middle school actually did this as an after school activity, which I participated in at length, but that was many moons ago. My chief concern is 1) not burning the finished product and 2) transferring it from the evaporating pans to the bottles - we don't have a spigot on our finishing pan, so I'll have to ladle it through a filtered funnel I guess.
Also, we have a monster maple tree in our driveway, but it's under some duress. This is a centerpiece tree - the kind of tree that is the focus of the whole property. I could probably put 6 to 8 buckets on it if it were healthy (it's two giant trunks merged together), but we had an arborist come by yesterday who warned us that the tree had major health issues (like an old metal chain that was grown into it, choking off its life and slowly killing half the tree) and that it would be best not to tap it.
-KD
10 comments:
i can just about identify any tree during the winter, but without a picture, words dont suffice...
ah, found one: http://www.oplin.org/tree/fact%20pages/maple_sugar/twig.jpg
here's a drawing:
http://www.extension.umaine.edu/mainetreeclub/images/factsheets/SugarMaple.jpg
(use google search, images)
we had 11 70yr old sugar maples and only "sugared" once, over 30 years back, a very amateur job, and as i recall a skin of blue mold formed on the unboiled sap, which we had to skim off...boiled in a pot in the kitchen for several days, very inefficient, and stored the syrup in the fridge while we used it...
a couple years later i tried again but gave up & just fed it to the bees...if you could get enough of it, the bees could make it into maple honey, & save you some energy...
big operators dont use buckets anymore; they run plastic tubing downhill from all their trees into a center tank or bladder...
if youre in maple country, your library should have several books by those who know more than i...
second link broke...
http://bit.ly/df0kin
thanks RJS. only problem is that there are no leafs, no maple "helicopters" and no buds on the trees. in fact, you're supposed to stop tapping when the buds form.
i know what you're talking about with the tubing on the trees - so commercial and NOT old-school New England! plus, it's ugly - my wife would never allow it
Kid,
The really sweet maples always have papery white bark. They come in small glades. Be careful as they don't produce much sap, but what they do, well, its gold.
J/k.
Here's the dibs:
Likely you'll have roughly three types of trees there:
Oaks -- very rough bark, probably still have some leaves attached, very tall and branches in a spade shape.
Poplar/Ash -- smooth bark, no leaves attached, if you try to break a 1/2" branch, it will bend and not break cleanly. These grow like weeds, will have generally smaller trunks, and grow straight up.
Maple -- medium rough bark clearly not smooth like poplars/ash and clearly not rough like oaks. Probably no leaves attached. Branches create a spherical shape.
Pretty easy to tell them apart. Drive about the country side and look for other maple sugaring operations and you should start to pick out the right trees.
You ready for the 3 feet of snow this weekend? Have you decided to take up skiing yet?
~~vlcccashmachine~~
vlc - you're absolutely right
(from what i've seen) about your 3 tree descriptions - and the oaks frequently do have a few stray leaves.
the best way to tell the maples, for me, is by the opposite branching structure - i think.
i don' think we're getting 3 feet this weekend - sounds like several days of wet mixed mush.
as for skiing - i live 10 minutes from Pat's Peak, where i haven't been, and 25 from Sunapee, where I went once - it's a pretty decent smaller mountain. I'm perfectly capable of skiing, but i don't have gear yet, so i'm unlikely to go more than one or two more times this year.
you would be tapping when the buds swell, but the latent buds are there all winter, and they are distinct...
i seldom use trunk or branch structure to ID trees; the shape of the buds on the twigs is my key...but ive been away from the books so long the botanical words to describe bud structure escape me...
maple buds are in opposite, 180 degree pairs, and each pair is 90 degrees from the pair below it..
prune a small length of branch off your known sugar maple and compare the bud shapes, offsets and internodes on that twig to others you believe to be the same...
here's good pics from cornell
http://bit.ly/9i2EUl
btw, my search was for "winter sugar maple twig" and turned up 108,000 images...
weird warning message from the bit.ly shortened search link; heres the link direct to the cornell site...
http://maple.dnr.cornell.edu/pubs/trees.htm
thanks - i'll keep my eyes open... and i saw that weird virus warning - bizarre
the bit.ly links goes to exactly the same site, but through the google search link...im thinking bit.ly must have some internal malware screen and it couldnt decipher where the long search link was pointing to...
what ive been fumbling around to say is that winter twigs are as species unique as the leaves are in summer, but similarly as difficult to describe in words as a leaf would be...
1. Put the jars in hot water.
2. Boil the jars.
3. Take them out and jar your syrup while everything is hot.
You MUST use canning jars. They are designed for the job.
Don't just throw empty jars in boiling water. (kaboom! goes the glass jar) Start with hot water, then boil them.
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