Posts Tagged ‘maple sugar’
end of the maple syrup season
On Monday, we finished our last lot of maple syrup for the season. The whole house was filled with the sweet smell of syrup at boil. I finish the syrup on our electric kitchen stove, in a pan made particularly for the purpose. Made of aluminum, it has a narrow base and a flared top. I thought it was a terrible extravagance at $268, but it really has improved both the boiling time and the process, and it will last for many years.
I love the final boiling. The smell of the steam is amazing and the boil of the syrup is fascinating to watch. While the sap is boiling, I skim the foam with a slotted spoon, a very soothing activity. Then, the temperature rises suddenly on the candy thermometer, and those huge candy bubbles start to form. The part I like best is hearing the seal ‘pop’ on the Mason jars and knowing we have produced enough syrup for our pancakes and muffins and a few gifts for family and friends, enough for the whole year.
This was not our best year but we are so used to the routine, it seemed painless. We tapped 10 Red Maple trees, collected 167 liters of sap (compared to 329 liters last year) from March 12 to April 6, and prepared 14 pints of syrup. The syrup was dark this year but very sweet and flavorful.
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sugartime slow
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in the rain
maples bloom
small red fireworks
slate sky
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drip slow
time slow
sap runs bitter
hardly worth the boil
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© Jane Tims 2012
maple syrup ups and downs
It may be a short maple syrup season this year. The weather has not been cooperative. In order for the sap to run, warm days are great, but the nights need to be cold. When the temperatures fall below zero, the sap in the tree runs from the crown to the roots. When the day is warm and sunny, the sap runs back up to the canopy. If there is no cold night, no sap.
So far we have collected about 40 liters of sap from our 10 trees and I have 3 bottles (each 500 ml or two cups) of lovely dark syrup! This compares to 136 liters of sap last year on the same date, from 12 trees.
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Cold night, warm day
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Icicles build
from the spile
sweet sickles of sap
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© Jane Tims 2012
maple syrup time
Well, the time has finally arrived. The nights are cold and the days this week are predicted to be sunny and warm. In our house the combination of cold days and warm nights means the sap is moving in our maple trees.
We tap Red Maple (Acer rubrum L.), although Sugar-maple (Acer saccharum Marsh) is preferred by commercial syrup producers. Last year we tapped 12 trees, about at the edge of our low-tech capability. This year we are tapping 10 trees.
We usually use the ‘old-fashioned’ spile and aluminum bucket method. This year, for the first time, my husband is trying a plastic spile and pipe system for 5 of our taps. It seems a little easier since the sap drips directly into a plastic reservoir and this eliminates one step in the endless pouring process.
For those of you unfamiliar with tapping trees for sap, the basic idea is to collect the sap and boil it down to make maple syrup. We select a tree, bore a hole, insert a spile and hang a bucket on the spile hook. The spile is a cleverly designed spigot which channels the sap from inside the tree into the bucket. The bucket is fitted with a cover to keep out rainwater or snow and reduce insect access.
So far this year, we have collected 25 liters of sap. This will boil down at about 40 to 1 to make a little more than 500 ml of syrup (about 2 cups). Last year, from a season total of 329 liters of sap, we made about 40 pint jars of syrup. If you try to calculate that at 40 to 1, it will never come out correctly since we don’t boil all of the sap to the same concentration and we drink some of the sap as a sweet drink.
Collecting maple sap is so much fun. It is good exercise and a great way to get your dose of warm spring sunshine. And, we have enough maple syrup to last for the year.
I’ll be keeping you up to date on our maple syrup adventures this year. Right now, the pot full of sap is boiling on the deck.
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sugar song
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cold nights
warm days
cold nights
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sap plucks stainless steel
different rhythm, every tap
quick and dead slow
in sync
with the downy woodpecker
or the bird with the round warble in its throat
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© Jane Tims 2012
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