The weather has been crazy again this year. Last year I missed sugar season altogether, as I was thinking we’d get another few weeks of cold weather after it warmed up early. We never did. This year I was more prepared. When we got a couple weeks of bitter cold weather, I figured we might see a break afterward that would allow tapping the trees. That is best done when temperatures are below freezing at night, and in the 30s or 40s during the day.
I rapped the two silver maples in the yard as I did before. I also tapped one of the two red maples we have in the side yard. Sure enough, over the next couple of days we got a couple gallons of sap from the silvers, and maybe a pint and a half or so from the red maple. Then – nothing. It’s not getting much below freezing at night, if at all. I was concerned that the sap I’d collected, sitting in a 5 gallon bucket on the patio, would warm up enough for the sap to spoil. The bucket was only half full, somewhere between 2 and 3 gallons, and I didn’t want that to go to waste.
I pulled our enameled stock pot from the basement, filled it up, and lit the propane under it. The stock pot works really well for this; it’s a couple inches bigger in diameter than the turkey fryer, so there’s more surface area to evaporate eat water. The batch was done boiling off by the time I was ready to shut the burner down for the night. It’s not quite syrup yet, but it’s pretty close. There’s a golden color to it, and it definitely tastes like maple syrup. I don’t really want to get the filters and hydrometer dirty for such a small batch, so I poured it into a couple of canning jars and ended up with a quart of what I’ll call “concentrate”. As we get more sap collected and boiled, I’ll combine this with what follows and finish off larger amounts.
It’s a promising start; I hope the weather cooperates and we end up with a good batch of syrup this year. The last run netted us around half a gallon, most of which we gave away to friends and family, and we ran out a while back. Since then we’ve had to “make do” with that Canadian stuff. 🙂
If the sap starts running well again, I’m thinking about making a run over to one of our rental houses where there’s a HUGE silver maple. I’m sure I can run at least two taps in that tree. I’ve got plastic tubing and will just run those taps into a bucket so I can go over once every couple of days to swap out buckets.