2011 Maple Sap Flow

I would like to begin this post by copying something from the internet I found recently. It is from the New Moon newsletters by Jessica Prentice and was originally written March 3, 2003.

The moon is new, and we are moving into the period called the Sap Moon by many Northeast Woodlands indigenous cultures, as well as in Colonial American Farmers' Almanacs. (Here at Pure Water Hollow, our new moon was just a few days ago, February 3rd, which is kinda neat.) It is the time of year when Northern dwellers would begin to check their maple trees for sap, and though there would still be snow and ice, the very first signs of spring would be stirring deep inside the trees as the sap would begin to rise up through the trunks. Maple sap runs from the first sign of thaw until the first buds appear on the trees -- a period of about 4 to 6 weeks depending on the weather.

In the north, the maple flow doesn't begin until March, but here in the south we are much earlier. The 10 taps on our sugar maples that we put in the last of January have all been flowing this week and I have found a little time to boil most of the sap we have gathered into syrup and sugar. It has meant some late nights for me, as well as one whole day from dawn till midnight, but I think it has been worth it! So far we have boiled down about 30 gallons of sap and made the equivalent of 10 cups of maple syrup, which would have filled 5 pint jars. I say "equivalent" because we are making most of it into sugar and candy.

Matthew and Christina have been going up to the "sugar bush" and gathering the sap. I decided not to purchase any new buckets this year, so we are just using old 3 gallon and 5 gallon buckets that we cleaned up. Here are 4 of them filled up with sap waiting to be brought into the "sugar shack" for boiling:

Now, back to the interesting newsletter by Ms. Prentice:

Maple sap was first harvested by the indigenous peoples of the Northern woodlands areas, where the Rock Maple, or Sugar Maple, is both native and prodigious. Iroquois legend has it that a chief named Woksis threw his tomahawk into a tree before leaving on a hunt, and that as the weather warmed the sap began to flow from the gash into a container that happened to be sitting by the tree. The woman of the house found the full container and thought it was water, and used it to boil the evening's meat. As the meat stewed, the sap cooked down into a syrup, and thus the knowledge of maple sugaring was born. ....

I've read legends like this in the past, concerning maple syrup. The story sounds a bit far fetched, but I am inclined to believe that something very similar did likely happen. The sap does look and feel just like water, so if some gathered accidentally in a container it could have easily been mistaken for water. It would have been very exciting to discover such a treasure, no matter how it originally came about!

Ms. Prentice also writes about the Indians taking the frozen content out of the sap buckets:

.... Another method used by indigenous women was to let the maple sap freeze overnight in the bark or hide vessels. In the morning, layers of ice would be discarded from the vessel, leaving a sweet, mapley slush at the bottom. This would be repeated over a series of nights until all the water had successively frozen and been removed, and all that would be left in the bottom of the vessel would be the maple syrup. This worked because the sugars in the sap would not freeze, but the water would.

Since I read something like that a year or two ago, I have adopted such a procedure in my own maple sap processing. With the nights going below freezing, some ice will invariably form in the buckets which can be fished out, or even lifted out in large pieces if the night was cold enough. It had gotten down to about 15 degrees the night before these next pictures were taken. I was able to remove very much ice from the sap. The bad part was how hard it was on my bare hands, since the air temperature was still 20 degrees when I was reaching them in the buckets to break the ice! I had to go in and warm my hands before I could finish getting the ice because they became so numb and burning! In the picture, you can see how the sap level changed after the ice was removed. The buckets were filled up almost to the rim before:

Indigenous communities would move camp during this time of year to be close to a grove of maple trees (called a 'sugar bush' by American colonists), and would pass the entirety of the month or so of the sap run there, engaged full-time in making sugar. When sap is cooked down past the syrup stage, it crystallizes and becomes sugar, which was the preferred method of indigenous people. I imagine this is because it is easier to transport as a solid than as a liquid. Maple sugar would be packed into containers made of birch bark (each holding 20-30 pounds). Enough for the community would be kept, and the rest traded, sold, or given away.

I am not going to be able to devote the entire month to making sugar, although it would be fun! And I'm not packing my sugar into bark containers either. Instead, we're putting the sugar into small molds and wrapping some of them in aluminum foil. Like these Valentine Maple Sugar Hearts!

Yesterday, as I was boiling the sap it began to snow! We got 2 inches by morning, so now everything feels right for maple sugaring! Up north I know they have snow by the feet, so it just seems right to have snow when we are doing up our Kentucky maple sap! This is the scene looking out the back door from my "sugar shack": (Actually it is just our old school building/ storage building, but it works well as my "sugar shack"!)

Around the bend and up the hill is the way to the sugar bush!

I like this from the Prentice newsletter because she quotes one of my favorite Founding Fathers, Benjamin Rush. From his quote, you also can't help but notice that skills once thought of as common and simple have been somehow lost by our society during our technological advances!

American colonists quickly adapted maple sugaring techniques to their own technologies, using spouts, buckets, and huge iron cauldrons to boil the sap down into sugar. Farmers in the Northern regions added maple-syrup making to their repertoire of homesteading skills. Benjamin Rush, in 1792, wrote: "no more knowledge is necessary for making this sugar than is required to make soap, cyder, beer, sour crout, etc., and yet one or all of these are made in most of the farm houses of the United States. The kettles and other utensils of a farmer's kitchen, will serve most of the purposes of making sugar and the time required for the labor, (if it deserve that name) is at a season when it is impossible for the farmer to employ himself in any species of agriculture."

If you want to check out the newsletter in it's entirety here is where I found it on the web:

http://cauldron.wisefoodways.com/2003/m03_sap_moon.php

I should note that I also found some interesting info on the web that would indicate my practice of discarding the ice may not be the best idea. Apparently, studies have found that the ice does, in fact, contain small amounts of the sugar, and when I throw out the ice, I am loosing some of the sugar that could be harvested. On the other hand, I suppose that the sap with the ice removed would still have a greater concentration of sugar and thus boil off to sugar quicker than with the ice melted.

Here is the quote from a maple syrup forum:

There was a rather detailed study done by the Philadelphia Maple Lab many years ago (before the time of ROs). Citation is: Stinson, E.E. and C.O. Willits. 1963. Freezing Sap. Maple Syrup Digest 2(2).

They found that a lot of sugar was trapped in the ice. The more ice in the bucket, the more sugar was lost (up to 62% could be lost in a bucket that was 95% ice...about 5-10% loss with 10-30% ice in the bucket).

It probably doesn't matter much one way or the other to such a small scale operation as mine, but I think I will try keeping more of the ice from now on to melt and then boil.

I have more sap to boil. As of now, school is on for tomorrow with an hour delay, so I may not be able to get back to it until tomorrow afternoon. Saturday will be spent partly at KMBC and we have a 30th anniversary celebration to attend Sunday after church. Finding the time to do the sugaring is being a problem this year!

I am thankful for all the Lord allows me to do, however, and I will be happy with whatever sugar He helps me to harvest!