For the past few years, we’ve come to be friends with Sue Baker, the woman who owns the sugarbush we rent in strafford for making maple syrup. We’ve built up that maple syrup business from the 700 taps her late husband sugared up to about 2,000 today. All along, we’ve been working with her to [...]
Common sense may say otherwise, but fall is the time maple syrup makers’ minds turn to thoughts of making even more maple syrup. They see beautiful yellow lines of sugar maple trees yet untapped for lack of that one last roll of 5/16th inch line last year. Over the summer, the memory metastasizes into schemes. [...]
Having a big log pile reminds me of being 16 back when I had my dad’s car and had just filled up the gas tank. So many options; so much potential. I have that feeling now as I look across the street from my house at this big, honking pile of hardwood. We took about [...]
They aren’t really new trees. Average age is perhaps 75, and ranging between 40 years old and 150 years old. Probably half of them have been tapped before, a few generations ago in the days of horses and buckets. But to me they’re new, and they seem to be multiplying as I’m running line to [...]
Reader Question: This was our first year making maple syrup with our 3 children, 3 and younger. We started late in the season but successfully made 2 gallons from two 100 ft sugar maple trees on our property. I tapped the trees with plastic spiles, 7 in total. Now that the season is finishing, do [...]
Yesterday warmed, and today we should be getting a good run, provided the wind doesn’t come up and knock down the sap. We took advantage of the slow flow yesterday to do some more sugarhouse fiddling, including getting the water going (more below) and arguing about how we should move maple syrup from the evaporator [...]
Saturday we tapped the Hubbard Hill bush. Five of us teemed over the hill, putting up 500 taps into holes we drilled into the trees. That night I moved the tapping equipment – mostly power drills with extra batteries and rechargers over at the Strafford bush in preparation for tapping on Sunday. Driving over with [...]
We got off easy, but I hear folks down south didn’t fare so well. This picture (below) shows the rime of ice covering all the twigs and branches of the lower part of our sugar maple forest in Strafford, Vermont in December 08. This picture is at about 800 feet of elevation. We got lucky [...]
Back in 1982, the Northeastern Forest Experiment Station put together a large series of studies into one document to help sugar makers employ some of the more interesting recent findings. That document is available here.
Some highlights:
- A good deal of what we know (which is still pretty incomplete) about how and why sap flows
- Optimal [...]
This overview shows how people take the fluid in the veins of trees and concentrate it to make maple syrup. You can search this site for more specific articles on each aspect, but here it is briefly all in one place.
For some unknown reason, sugar maple trees produce much, much more sap and much sweeter [...]