Our frigid cold temps are seemingly behind us and the forecast for the next 10 days looks spring-like! With temps below freezing at night and up to around 40 degrees during the day, it will be the perfect conditions for maple sugaring. We still have a little snow on the ground too.  Hubby and invited some friends who are interested in learning the ins and outs of maple syrup production on the homestead scale to come join us in setting the taps and sap line for our sugaring. So hubby went out and put in taps with them on the maples at the front of the property, teaching them the dimensions of a tappable tree and important things like how deep to drill the tap hole and how many taps can be put on what size tree. (I stayed either behind the camera, or in the kitchen preparing lunch.) They got the trees on the front of the property done and then came in to lunch.  We had chili with homemade Mexican sausage, and sourdough discard dinner rolls with honey butter. 

This afternoon we went out and tapped the remaining trees on the side of the property. These should start running within the next 24 hours as conditions sound like they'll be perfect.  Its early still as we don't usually start collecting sap until the end of February or beginning of March on some years.  But we don't call the shots here weatherwise.  We adapt and change our game plan to accommodate Mother Nature, and when she says its time, well, then its time!

We put in taps, run food grade plastic tubing to the taps and the other end goes into a 15 gallon food grade barrel.  When the barrel is nearly full we'll start boiling sap on an outdoor wood burning evaporator. It takes about 4 hours of good rolling boil to boil down 40 or so gallons of sap into about a gallon of syrup, depending on the type of maples used.  Sugar maples have more sugar content in the sap so they take fewer gallons of sap to produce a gallon of syrup. Red maples take slightly more sap to produce the same gallon of syrup, but the syrup tends to be a darker more burgundy syrup than that produced from sugar maples. Silver maples tend to have a lot higher water content and lower sugar content so they take longer and more sap to boil down to that gallon of syrup. The sap flows from the trees, through the tubing and into a barrel. We collect the sap and start boiling it down on our evaporator as soon as the barrels start to get 2/3 full.  We'll boil it down to where its nearly finished outside and bring it into our farmhouse kitchen to finish off.  When we've made all the syrup we want for the year, we'll turn a gallon or so of syrup into maple sugar.  What a treat that is! We use maple sugar in oatmeal and other delicious meals. 

Here is a photo run of our process in tapping the trees.  We'll do a post on actual boiling and sugar making later.  Maple sugaring season is always a harbinger of spring, so yay!!