Days with temperatures climbing into the balmy mid-forties, and nights which drop below freezing — perfect maple syruping weather. The rising daytime temperatures build up pressure inside of the maple trees, causing the sap — the watery liquid stored inside of the trees — to flow. It flows through the maple’s “vessels” (like blood through our blood vessels), and out through the holes we’ve drilled in the trees, down into the buckets. That’s nature’s part of the process — very helpful, and I admit we couldn’t do without it — but now comes the real work of maple syruping for us…

Collecting Sap

This sap is so clear, it’s difficult to see in the photo. A common misconception is the the sap flows out of the tree, thick and sweet and golden, just like maple syrup ought to be! Alas, no. We’ve got a lot of collecting and boiling and filtering to do before we arrive at a pancake-worthy end product!

Once again the four-wheeler proves indispensable. We use it to pull the barrel-shaped sap carrier around the trails, dumping sap from our collecting buckets into the funnel on top of the carrier. Dad, a welder and metalworker by trade, made the sap carrier himself, back in the early years of maple syruping.

The sap flows down the funnel, through a fine strainer, and into the tank below.

On especially cold days, the ice formed on the sap during the night hasn’t melted yet. The ice has a very low sugar-content, so we just toss it out onto the ground. Removing the ice (mainly water) speeds up the boiling process later on.

This year, we tried out a new idea — tying orange plastic around trees which are poor sap-producers, so we can skip tapping them next year.

About halfway through the collecting, it suddenly started to snow! Huge, wet flakes came pelting down, getting in our eyes and frosting our hair.

With the sap safely gathered in the collecting tank, it’s time to head for home, where we’ll complete the maple syruping process with step three: Boiling Down!

For more “hows and whys” about maple syruping, have a look at this publication by the University of Maine’s Cooperative Extention: http://www.umext.maine.edu/onlinepubs/pdfpubs/7036.pdf