I don't know what kind of winter preceding the sap flow is the best for making sweet maple syrup, but I have my own idea. I like the winters when we have a period or two of very cold temperatures early on, because I can imagine the trees truly going dormant during those periods. I then imagine the trees trying especially hard to burst back into life later in the winter by producing very sweet sap.
The weather this winter has been such, although I really don't know if it matters. We had a couple periods in November, from November 13th through the 15th and again 18th through the 22nd, when the highs did not reach much above freezing and the lows got down near the single digits. We also had a very cold time earlier this month from January 7th through the 11th when the lows were near zero during 4 of those 5 nights.
Anyway, we decided to tap a few of our maple trees again on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Matthew and Simon did the work drilling the holes and inserting the spiles into the trees, but the whole family hiked up to the "sugar bush" to watch. We only put in 6 taps, but the sap flow was on! Those 6 taps produced 4 gallons in just a few hours and we started the boiling yesterday. I'm sure there will be more to come because we are currently in a weather cycle when the days are in the 40s and 50s and the lows are dropping into the 20s at night.
We don't do this every year. Looking back at my old posts, I see that we've made maple sugar/syrup in just 4 of the previous 7 years: 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2013. I enjoy doing this, but it is a bit time intensive and some years, things just don't work out for us to do the syrup. Last year was so extremely cold and snowy and we were busy settling into our move to Pure Water Pastures. In 2009 we were preoccupied with the home butching of our first hogs and in 2012 the winter was one of the warmest on record and never felt like sugaring weather. We are just now running out of the syrup we made in 2013, so this seems to be a good year to get back in it!
Showing posts with label maple sugar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maple sugar. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Maple Sweet'nins 2013
We've been getting a gradual supply of sap from 5 of the 6 trees Simon tapped last month. I've done things differently this year in that I've worked little by little at boiling the sap instead of working marathon all-nighters.
I've been keeping what sap we get cold until we have at least 3 gallons, which is enough to make an 8 ounce jar of pure maple syrup. I'll take a batch of 3 gallons and maybe boil it down enough to fit in a gallon pitcher. Then I'll come back to it later when I have time again and finish it off while also starting on another 3 gallon batch. Of course with only 5 taps working instead of 10 or 15, we've not had the over flowing abundance of sap that kept me hopping other years either.
I think I like this slower pace of sugarin'. I've done 3 jars of actual syrup, and then we've also turned 4 jars worth into maple sugar/candy. There's also 2 jars worth in the refrigerator that have boiled down to about half a gallon so far and there is another couple gallons of sap waiting to be boiled. If you're counting, that's 29 gallons of sap we've collected so far this season. Not all that much, but better than nothing! And there may still be time for them to flow some more before we hit spring full time.
My Maple Sugar Valentine heart's did not turn out looking as good as I would have liked this year, but they sure were good and sweet! Yum!
Happy Valentine's Day!
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Sweet'nin'
The following is from a book off my shelf called Frontier Living written and illustrated by Edwin Tunis. I was reading it while boiling down maple sap this afternoon and I thought this section was interesting.
"Communication was established with New Orleans by river about 1790. Until then true molasses wasn't to be had at any price. The backwoodsmen gave the name molasses to maple syrup and to a sweet liquid they managed to extract from pumpkins..... Maple syrup, maple sugar, and honey were the common "sweet'nin's." Every family had a maple grove, and sugaring was an early spring job of men and boys. They tapped the trees crudely and wastefully with an ax and drove homemade buckeye (horse chestnut) spiles into the cuts. The sap dripped into pails hung on the trees and stopped at night. It was collected at dusk in a barrel lashed to the kind of simple sled known as a pung and dragged to the fire.
The sap, thickening as it cooked, boiled all night in an iron pot in front of a half-faced camp. Some of the syrup was further boiled in the morning and "grained" into sugar in molds. Such sleep as the workers got, they caught in cat naps while the sap was running, but nobody minded that. The whole business was a lark, and to sit in the camp in the firelight and drink spicewood tea with maple syrup was pure bliss for a backwoods boy. The tea was made from the swelling buds of the spice bush and was probably very good."
We have made spice bush tea before, and I must say, it is very good! In the past we have only sweetened it with honey, however, but I must try using some of our maple syrup! The spice bushes around here are one of the first plants to bud out, but I don't think they have just yet. I'll have to check soon.
Well, I just wanted to type this out while back at the house on a break from sugarin' to eat dinner. Lisa made home-made pizza, my favorite! Now I must get up the road to feed the cows as it is starting to get dark. I'll try to write more about our sugarin' this year later.
"Communication was established with New Orleans by river about 1790. Until then true molasses wasn't to be had at any price. The backwoodsmen gave the name molasses to maple syrup and to a sweet liquid they managed to extract from pumpkins..... Maple syrup, maple sugar, and honey were the common "sweet'nin's." Every family had a maple grove, and sugaring was an early spring job of men and boys. They tapped the trees crudely and wastefully with an ax and drove homemade buckeye (horse chestnut) spiles into the cuts. The sap dripped into pails hung on the trees and stopped at night. It was collected at dusk in a barrel lashed to the kind of simple sled known as a pung and dragged to the fire.
The sap, thickening as it cooked, boiled all night in an iron pot in front of a half-faced camp. Some of the syrup was further boiled in the morning and "grained" into sugar in molds. Such sleep as the workers got, they caught in cat naps while the sap was running, but nobody minded that. The whole business was a lark, and to sit in the camp in the firelight and drink spicewood tea with maple syrup was pure bliss for a backwoods boy. The tea was made from the swelling buds of the spice bush and was probably very good."
We have made spice bush tea before, and I must say, it is very good! In the past we have only sweetened it with honey, however, but I must try using some of our maple syrup! The spice bushes around here are one of the first plants to bud out, but I don't think they have just yet. I'll have to check soon.
Well, I just wanted to type this out while back at the house on a break from sugarin' to eat dinner. Lisa made home-made pizza, my favorite! Now I must get up the road to feed the cows as it is starting to get dark. I'll try to write more about our sugarin' this year later.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
River Rising (Maple sap, too?)
I've been keeping a watch on the river due to the steady rains we have been having in and around our area. This is the first high water we've had since we've owned a river bank up the road at Pure Water Pastures, so I was curious as to how easily that area floods. What we call "the river bank" is probably a few acres of wooded level land much lower than the pasture fields above. It is an awesome area that is much neater than the small "river bank" we have here at Pure Water Hollow. Well, that bank is apparently a foot lower there, or maybe the river a foot deeper there? I don't know how that works. But anyway, I thought it was interesting that nearly the entire level river bank there was under water when the depth at Paintsville was 17 feet, when at the same time the water here was several feet from beginning to creep up over our level river bank area. The river bank here was not covered until 22 feet. Right now, at 27 feet, the water is up to within a foot of the top of the pipe gate down there, so it is safe to say that the entire river bank here is under at least 3 feet of water. At Lawrence county it is up to an old tree stand we can see, so most of that river bank must be up to 6 or 7 feet deep! When the water goes down, I'll be able to measure that tree stand and see how high the water was.
Here is the graphic I've been watching on the computer. It posts the depths of the river as they measure it at the town up the river. You can see that it is at 27.43 feet right now. The rain has stopped and they are predicting the river to go down.
This has not been a flood at all, but in the past, I have often wished that I knew at what point our river bank goes under water. Now I know that at 22 feet you can't walk around the peach trees down there without splashing, and above 23 feet things can start floating away! I also wish I knew at what point our state road gets closed for water. I have pictures from 2009 of the children standing on the submerged road when the river measured 32 feet at Paintsville, but from the looks of the pictures, the water probably covered the road initially maybe at 29 or 30 feet? I sort of hope the river will continue to rise over night just so I can see exactly at what point the road gets covered! Maybe I am a bit strange?
Here is the info the above website posts concerning flood threats. I figure I may want to refer back to it sometime in the future and this is one place I can store facts like this.
On a homestead note, Simon and I tapped 6 of our sugar maple trees today. That's not very many, I know. I'm not sure if we'll have much time for boiling the sap down this year, but I decided that I would like to try to do a little. We did not get any last year, partly because it was such a warm winter, but also because of the time factor. This winter has been fairly warm, also, so I'm not really sure what the sap will be like, or if it will be flowing now or not.
Here is the graphic I've been watching on the computer. It posts the depths of the river as they measure it at the town up the river. You can see that it is at 27.43 feet right now. The rain has stopped and they are predicting the river to go down.
This has not been a flood at all, but in the past, I have often wished that I knew at what point our river bank goes under water. Now I know that at 22 feet you can't walk around the peach trees down there without splashing, and above 23 feet things can start floating away! I also wish I knew at what point our state road gets closed for water. I have pictures from 2009 of the children standing on the submerged road when the river measured 32 feet at Paintsville, but from the looks of the pictures, the water probably covered the road initially maybe at 29 or 30 feet? I sort of hope the river will continue to rise over night just so I can see exactly at what point the road gets covered! Maybe I am a bit strange?
Here is the info the above website posts concerning flood threats. I figure I may want to refer back to it sometime in the future and this is one place I can store facts like this.
Flood Categories (in feet)
Major Flood Stage: 42
Moderate Flood Stage: 38
Flood Stage: 35
Action Stage: 28
- 47.4 100 year return period flood
- 45.92 flooding will exceed the highest flood on record. Ninety percent of businesses and eighty percent of homes flooded
- 44.6 50 year return period flood
- 44 right bank overtopped
- 42 major flooding occurs. Businesses begin to flood
- 39 10 year return period flood
- 38 moderate flooding occurs. Water enters houses along Bridge St, Frank St, and Euclid Avenue
- 35 low lying areas flood. Underpass at KY 40 is closed separating the town east of the river. Left bank overtopped flooding Bridge Street
- 32 water covers low spot on underpass of KY 40
- 28 action stage
The highest crest they show during the time we've lived here at Pure Water Hollow was on 2/17/2003 when they recorded 37.67 feet. That really was a flood! Interestingly, they also list the top flood at 46.6 feet on 2/1/1862. I wonder how accurate that is? The second highest was 45.92 feet on 1/31/1957. The old-timers still talk about that one!
On a homestead note, Simon and I tapped 6 of our sugar maple trees today. That's not very many, I know. I'm not sure if we'll have much time for boiling the sap down this year, but I decided that I would like to try to do a little. We did not get any last year, partly because it was such a warm winter, but also because of the time factor. This winter has been fairly warm, also, so I'm not really sure what the sap will be like, or if it will be flowing now or not.
But, the temperatures are supposed to play along the next few days. Tonight is forecasted to be 19, tomorrow sunny and 38, tomorrow night 26, Saturday sunny and 49, night dipping back to 28, Sunday cloudy and 37 with a low that night down to 19. Maybe the sap flow will be on tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday? Monday is not supposed to get above freezing, so that should stop the flow if one gets started. We'll see. At least the spouts are in and buckets hung, so whenever the weather dictates a flow, we'll catch some of the sweet sap and see what kind of maple syrup and sugar it makes!
I have a little extra time right now due to the fact that my school has called off this week Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday due to the flu! All the surrounding counties have also dismissed. We're missing 3 days for sickness and also Martin Luther King Jr Day Monday, so I'm off work until January 22nd! It's been a nice break so far and I'm thankful that we are all well here at Pure Water Hollow!
I have a little extra time right now due to the fact that my school has called off this week Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday due to the flu! All the surrounding counties have also dismissed. We're missing 3 days for sickness and also Martin Luther King Jr Day Monday, so I'm off work until January 22nd! It's been a nice break so far and I'm thankful that we are all well here at Pure Water Hollow!
This has been an odd blog post, I guess, and probably not too interesting to many. But, it was on my mind and I had a moment to put it down in writing, so I did!
Thursday, February 10, 2011
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:
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.
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!
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:
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:
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!
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
The Taps Are In But Will Time Work Out?
Matthew put 10 taps in our sugar maples yesterday as we are anticipating a good sap flow right now. We enjoy the natural maple sugar that comes from boiling down the sap and our supply is getting pretty low from last year's harvest. We also turn some into maple syrup, but we've discovered that we make better use of the sugar form so that's what we will go for mostly. Sugar keeps almost indefinitely where the syrup has to be kept refrigerated after the jar is opened and can ruin after a few months.
Our 7 day weather forecast is showing some good maple sap days:
Other sources are predicting Wednesday night to be below freezing instead of 38, which would be better. What we want is a pattern of the day time temperature being above freezing while the nights drop below freezing. I especially like to see the days hit 40 with the nights dropping into the mid 20s. The sap flow will stop when the temperature stays above freezing for too long or when the temperature is below freezing for too long. Like life in general, the maple trees need a nice balance to flow freely!
Matthew said several of the taps were already dripping last night! Now the problem will be finding the hours needed to boil the sap down once we get a sufficient amount collected. It looks like school will be on all week, so the days will not be available for me. Tonight we have the annual meeting of the volunteer fire department where I'm treasurer. Wednesday evening I will either be going to our monthly mid-week service at church or I'll be picking up our pork and stopping over at KMBC. Thursday evening is the Bible study at our community center that I've been leading. So that leaves Friday evening and the weekend before I will be able to get to the sap! I hope we have a good sap run, but I don't want it to ruin before I can get to it!
We will just have to do our best and trust that everything will work out! Balance is the key!
Our 7 day weather forecast is showing some good maple sap days:
Other sources are predicting Wednesday night to be below freezing instead of 38, which would be better. What we want is a pattern of the day time temperature being above freezing while the nights drop below freezing. I especially like to see the days hit 40 with the nights dropping into the mid 20s. The sap flow will stop when the temperature stays above freezing for too long or when the temperature is below freezing for too long. Like life in general, the maple trees need a nice balance to flow freely!
Matthew said several of the taps were already dripping last night! Now the problem will be finding the hours needed to boil the sap down once we get a sufficient amount collected. It looks like school will be on all week, so the days will not be available for me. Tonight we have the annual meeting of the volunteer fire department where I'm treasurer. Wednesday evening I will either be going to our monthly mid-week service at church or I'll be picking up our pork and stopping over at KMBC. Thursday evening is the Bible study at our community center that I've been leading. So that leaves Friday evening and the weekend before I will be able to get to the sap! I hope we have a good sap run, but I don't want it to ruin before I can get to it!
We will just have to do our best and trust that everything will work out! Balance is the key!
Friday, February 26, 2010
2010 Sap Flow: Beware of Indoor Boiling
For the past week the maple sap flow has been on at Pure Water Hollow, and I have been boiling it down for the past 2 days, almost non-stop! We again only used 10 taps in 8 trees, just like we did two years ago. I’ve lost track of the number of gallons of sap we have harvested, but we believe it has been about 60. It has yeilded a gallon of syrup so far, with about 10 gallons of sap still on the range waiting to be finished off! If we are correct in how much sap we have had, we are hitting pretty much on that 50:1 ratio. We discovered before that our sap to syrup ratio here in Kentucky is greater than the 40:1 ratio that New England gets, but sometimes it is a bit better than 50:1. The sap flow pretty much stopped by Thursday because it stayed cold (we got more snow on Wednesday and Thursday).
The cold temps allowed me to do a trick with the sap that I have read that the Indians used to do. I was able to remove a good deal of the water content by taking the ice out of the buckets instead of just boiling it all! The unfrozen part would have a greater concentration of sugar. This helped quite a bit.
I was re-reading my maple syrup posts from the 08 season, which was the first time we attempted maple syrup. After boiling down 50 or so gallons this time around, I feel I should clear up what appeared to be a bit of misinformation. I found this statement from an old post:
"I had read in many places not to boil the sap in doors. At least one source said that all the steam would coat everything in the house with a sticky residue. After letting many gallons of sap boil on our kitchen range, I would now say the sticky residue part is a myth. After thinking about it, it doesn’t make sense that the steam would be sticky since the only thing that is boiling away in the steam is the water content. The tree sap is 98% water and only 2% sugar. About 2/3 of the water needs to be taken out. The remaining solution would be 66-67% sugar and would now be syrup. The only thing that is evaporated into the air is all that water."
Well, that year I didn’t have much trouble in the kitchen at the beginning, but after everything was said and done, Erica and Lisa did complain a bit about a sticky residue that was all over the cabinets and appliances that they had to clean up!
This year I have been doing all the boiling up at the extra house on our property that we use as a school house and storage building. Our kitchen at the house has high, 9 foot ceilings, but this kitchen has a low, 7 foot ceiling. For some reason, the condensation from the steam has been incredible this year! I was using 2 giant 21 quart canning pots, one large stock pot, and two smaller pans on all four burners on the range as well as a hot plate on the counter.
That many gallons of sap boiling all at the same time produced some amazing atmospheric changes in the room! I have had to wear a cap because of the multitude of dripping, yellowish sap droplets from the ceiling! It has been like being in the woods after a great cloud burst with water dripping sporadically all over the place from all the leaves. The walls and cabinets have been covered and discolored by the moisture as well! There are streaks of yellow running down the walls from the moisture. It has really been a mess, and when things dry, everything is sticky and icky. My shooes make a suction/sticky sound when walking across the floor! I would definitely warn folks now to never boil this much sap down in their home!
After the pots got to a roaring boil and before I opened the windows and door, a dense cloud of moisture hung in the top 4 feet of the room! It looked just like I would imagine being in a house fire would look like. The bottom three feet along the floor was clear, but above you could not hardly see your hand in front of your face! One reason for this, I guess, was that we don’t usually heat this building much above freezing, so the air was cool. With the windows and doors open, it stayed pretty cold in there, and I felt like I was in an old fashioned sugar shack that I’ve seen pictures of. The outside of the school house looked pretty cool, too, when I went out to check on the chickens once. When the wind blew the right way, great billows of steam could be seen coming out of the side window! But even with the windows and door open, it did not help the residue droplets that formed everywhere.
I still think what I wrote a couple of years ago sounds correct, in that most of what is evaporated is just H2O, and shouldn’t cause a problem. But I guess I now proved that somehow water content from maple tree sap is indeed tainted with stickiness and can in fact cause all sorts of problems!
It really hasn’t been a great problem for us, since we do not live in this building, but we will have quite a mess to clean up when everything is finished! Someday, I still hope to have a real sugar shack and use wood-burning stoves to boil the sap!
Next week, the sap may start flowing again, and we may get to produce more sugar. If we do, I suppose I will just open the windows and keep my hat on in our sugar shack/ school house/ storage building!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7 comments
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Debbie on February 26, 2010 at 11:02 am
This makes sense because if you fry meat on the stove the same thing happens. You get sticky grease everywhere.
Sounds like fun… Do you save all your syrup or sell it?
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Purewater on February 26, 2010 at 1:55 pm
A comment from Debbie asked about selling the syrup.
We have not tried selling any syrup, but we did give several jars as gifts, with great reviews. I probably could find some folks who would buy all that we make, but since we are doing such a small amount I don't really want to do that. We have enough trees that we could probably run 3 to 4 times as many taps as we are now, but that would also be 3 to 4 times more work! Maybe we will work up to doing more in future years, but for now, this is all I can handle!
We are planning on changing most of this year's syrup into powdered sugar. The syrup we made in 08 has lasted us until now (we still have some jars). We will likely make better use of the product as sugar. I think natural maple sugar should be healthier for us compared to commercial sugar!
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Lyn on February 26, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Hi, we live in TN, and we just ordered equipment to tap our maple trees. Do you think it will be to late to get any syrup this year? We have been wanting to try this for a long time. We finally decided to go for it. Do you tap just sugar maples or all maples? Hope the rest of the season goes well for you.
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Purewater on February 27, 2010 at 12:03 am
Lyn,
I really don't know how the maple sap will be in TN. Many people around here thought we were too far south in KY for maple syrup making, but they were wrong! You will just have to give it a try.
The sap from trees in our area has less sugar content than those in New England, but I believe the syrup that results is as good and sweet as theirs is. It just takes me boiling a bit more sap than they do up north. A friend of mine vacations up in Maine frequently, and she said our syrup was as good as anything she ever gets in New England! I think the further south you go, the less sugar content you will have.
As far as timing, I would guess it may be getting too late for you this year. But if it stays cold long enough, you may still have a chance. Ours flow when we have a string of days in the 40s and nights in the 20s. I think sunshine helps a lot, too. I've read that you will get bitter sap after the trees start budding out, which should begin pretty soon. I think I will have another week or so of sugaring weather here in KY, but as we get on into the middle of March I'm counting on more spring-like weather!
We try to only tap the sugar maples on our property. The books say that all maple varieties can be tapped, but they have different sugar levels. Some day I will experiment with the other maples and see what the difference is. I think they should make good syrup, but we may need more sap to get the same results? When the leaves are on is the only way we can differentiate the sugar maple from the other maples. Two years ago we marked the trees with paint so we could find them in the winter with no leaves.
Good luck with your sugaring endeavor! I'll try to check out your blog to see if you write anything about it. If it doesn't work this year, start being on the watch next year begining in January. I made some good syrup this year in January, but it was not a very heavy sap flow.
God bless,
-Eric
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www.homesteaderbellesblog.blogspot.com on February 27, 2010 at 11:46 pm
Hi Eric,
Thank you so much for visiting my blog and leaving a comment.
I am sorry to hear about all the sticky! It is still worth it though in my opinion.
It really cold here again, so the sap isn't really running right now. I can not wait until the sap flows! Sap collecting and syrup making is so much fun!
I hope you and your family are enjoying the sap season.
Just thought I would drop by, read your post, and wish your sap season well.
Belle @ http://www.homesteaderbellesblog.blogspot.com/
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Schatzi on March 2, 2010 at 6:48 pm
What a great post…I remember way back when my grandparents made maple syrup…for some reason I remember them doing all their boiling outside in a big pot under an open fire…this was a wonderful time for us kids to watch that..and taste the finished product LOL.
Connie
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HerbsandHoney on March 22, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Yes it can be a sticky mess We didn't get trees tapped before the first run this year Will try for a small fall run. Hope you get lots of syrup.
Blessings,
Herbs & Honey
The cold temps allowed me to do a trick with the sap that I have read that the Indians used to do. I was able to remove a good deal of the water content by taking the ice out of the buckets instead of just boiling it all! The unfrozen part would have a greater concentration of sugar. This helped quite a bit.
I was re-reading my maple syrup posts from the 08 season, which was the first time we attempted maple syrup. After boiling down 50 or so gallons this time around, I feel I should clear up what appeared to be a bit of misinformation. I found this statement from an old post:
"I had read in many places not to boil the sap in doors. At least one source said that all the steam would coat everything in the house with a sticky residue. After letting many gallons of sap boil on our kitchen range, I would now say the sticky residue part is a myth. After thinking about it, it doesn’t make sense that the steam would be sticky since the only thing that is boiling away in the steam is the water content. The tree sap is 98% water and only 2% sugar. About 2/3 of the water needs to be taken out. The remaining solution would be 66-67% sugar and would now be syrup. The only thing that is evaporated into the air is all that water."
Well, that year I didn’t have much trouble in the kitchen at the beginning, but after everything was said and done, Erica and Lisa did complain a bit about a sticky residue that was all over the cabinets and appliances that they had to clean up!
This year I have been doing all the boiling up at the extra house on our property that we use as a school house and storage building. Our kitchen at the house has high, 9 foot ceilings, but this kitchen has a low, 7 foot ceiling. For some reason, the condensation from the steam has been incredible this year! I was using 2 giant 21 quart canning pots, one large stock pot, and two smaller pans on all four burners on the range as well as a hot plate on the counter.
That many gallons of sap boiling all at the same time produced some amazing atmospheric changes in the room! I have had to wear a cap because of the multitude of dripping, yellowish sap droplets from the ceiling! It has been like being in the woods after a great cloud burst with water dripping sporadically all over the place from all the leaves. The walls and cabinets have been covered and discolored by the moisture as well! There are streaks of yellow running down the walls from the moisture. It has really been a mess, and when things dry, everything is sticky and icky. My shooes make a suction/sticky sound when walking across the floor! I would definitely warn folks now to never boil this much sap down in their home!
After the pots got to a roaring boil and before I opened the windows and door, a dense cloud of moisture hung in the top 4 feet of the room! It looked just like I would imagine being in a house fire would look like. The bottom three feet along the floor was clear, but above you could not hardly see your hand in front of your face! One reason for this, I guess, was that we don’t usually heat this building much above freezing, so the air was cool. With the windows and doors open, it stayed pretty cold in there, and I felt like I was in an old fashioned sugar shack that I’ve seen pictures of. The outside of the school house looked pretty cool, too, when I went out to check on the chickens once. When the wind blew the right way, great billows of steam could be seen coming out of the side window! But even with the windows and door open, it did not help the residue droplets that formed everywhere.
I still think what I wrote a couple of years ago sounds correct, in that most of what is evaporated is just H2O, and shouldn’t cause a problem. But I guess I now proved that somehow water content from maple tree sap is indeed tainted with stickiness and can in fact cause all sorts of problems!
It really hasn’t been a great problem for us, since we do not live in this building, but we will have quite a mess to clean up when everything is finished! Someday, I still hope to have a real sugar shack and use wood-burning stoves to boil the sap!
Next week, the sap may start flowing again, and we may get to produce more sugar. If we do, I suppose I will just open the windows and keep my hat on in our sugar shack/ school house/ storage building!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7 comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debbie on February 26, 2010 at 11:02 am
This makes sense because if you fry meat on the stove the same thing happens. You get sticky grease everywhere.
Sounds like fun… Do you save all your syrup or sell it?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Purewater on February 26, 2010 at 1:55 pm
A comment from Debbie asked about selling the syrup.
We have not tried selling any syrup, but we did give several jars as gifts, with great reviews. I probably could find some folks who would buy all that we make, but since we are doing such a small amount I don't really want to do that. We have enough trees that we could probably run 3 to 4 times as many taps as we are now, but that would also be 3 to 4 times more work! Maybe we will work up to doing more in future years, but for now, this is all I can handle!
We are planning on changing most of this year's syrup into powdered sugar. The syrup we made in 08 has lasted us until now (we still have some jars). We will likely make better use of the product as sugar. I think natural maple sugar should be healthier for us compared to commercial sugar!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lyn on February 26, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Hi, we live in TN, and we just ordered equipment to tap our maple trees. Do you think it will be to late to get any syrup this year? We have been wanting to try this for a long time. We finally decided to go for it. Do you tap just sugar maples or all maples? Hope the rest of the season goes well for you.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Purewater on February 27, 2010 at 12:03 am
Lyn,
I really don't know how the maple sap will be in TN. Many people around here thought we were too far south in KY for maple syrup making, but they were wrong! You will just have to give it a try.
The sap from trees in our area has less sugar content than those in New England, but I believe the syrup that results is as good and sweet as theirs is. It just takes me boiling a bit more sap than they do up north. A friend of mine vacations up in Maine frequently, and she said our syrup was as good as anything she ever gets in New England! I think the further south you go, the less sugar content you will have.
As far as timing, I would guess it may be getting too late for you this year. But if it stays cold long enough, you may still have a chance. Ours flow when we have a string of days in the 40s and nights in the 20s. I think sunshine helps a lot, too. I've read that you will get bitter sap after the trees start budding out, which should begin pretty soon. I think I will have another week or so of sugaring weather here in KY, but as we get on into the middle of March I'm counting on more spring-like weather!
We try to only tap the sugar maples on our property. The books say that all maple varieties can be tapped, but they have different sugar levels. Some day I will experiment with the other maples and see what the difference is. I think they should make good syrup, but we may need more sap to get the same results? When the leaves are on is the only way we can differentiate the sugar maple from the other maples. Two years ago we marked the trees with paint so we could find them in the winter with no leaves.
Good luck with your sugaring endeavor! I'll try to check out your blog to see if you write anything about it. If it doesn't work this year, start being on the watch next year begining in January. I made some good syrup this year in January, but it was not a very heavy sap flow.
God bless,
-Eric
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www.homesteaderbellesblog.blogspot.com on February 27, 2010 at 11:46 pm
Hi Eric,
Thank you so much for visiting my blog and leaving a comment.
I am sorry to hear about all the sticky! It is still worth it though in my opinion.
It really cold here again, so the sap isn't really running right now. I can not wait until the sap flows! Sap collecting and syrup making is so much fun!
I hope you and your family are enjoying the sap season.
Just thought I would drop by, read your post, and wish your sap season well.
Belle @ http://www.homesteaderbellesblog.blogspot.com/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Schatzi on March 2, 2010 at 6:48 pm
What a great post…I remember way back when my grandparents made maple syrup…for some reason I remember them doing all their boiling outside in a big pot under an open fire…this was a wonderful time for us kids to watch that..and taste the finished product LOL.
Connie
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HerbsandHoney on March 22, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Yes it can be a sticky mess We didn't get trees tapped before the first run this year Will try for a small fall run. Hope you get lots of syrup.
Blessings,
Herbs & Honey
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Our 4th Winter Storm of the Season: Life Goes On
Here at Pure Water Hollow we are experiencing our 4th good snow of this winter! I haven’t written anything since November, so I thought I would update a little bit about the winter of 09/10.
The first big storm hit eastern Kentucky back on December 18th and 19th when we got about 6 inches of snow and ice here at our home. During this storm we left Pure Water Hollow to visit my mother for the holidays. This was another one of those wet snows that took down trees and power lines! We were only without power for a day or so (which didn’t affect us much since we were out of town) but some of our neighbors were without power through Christmas Day! Other areas were hit even harder and there were reports of students being stranded at their school in Harlan when the snow hit so quickly and it was not possible to get out. Some of those students actually had to stay the night at school!
We got some snow on December 30th and 31st but the next big storm was on January 4th and 5th when we had 5 to 6 inches of snow. During this time was very cold, with tempertures staying below freezing for 2 consecutive weeks. We saw huge ice bergs floating in our river, so if the cold snap had lasted much longer, the river may have frozen over like it did back in 94. But the cold didn’t hold on, and the lows never got below zero like it did in 94.
During this storm, we almost got snowed in at Harlan, KY because that was where our brake line broke as we were on our way home from a fantastic vacation in the Carribean. The brake-line stranded us the night before the storm, just three hours from home! We got it fixed and drove home the next day while the snow was still accumulating! The following days saw us wind down from the trip and get things unpacked and back to normal.
We had a couple of mild, warmer weeks when the maple sap began to flow and I was able to make a couple of jars of maple syrup, but then we had a huge 6-8 inch dry snow on January 29th and 30th. I only measured 6 on the ground here, (with some 10inch drifts) but other areas of our county reported 8 inches on the ground. This was the weekend we decided to butcher one of our hogs, which was cold, but made for a pretty setting also. We did everything ourselves again in our side yard, with Matthew doing the main work. From this 360 pound pig we got several good roasts, made the tenderloin into about 62 delicious thick slices, and are curing about 50 pounds of ham. Lisa also rendered out about 30 pounds of lard which we hope to use some of to make soap. The big success this time has been the sausage, which we wanted to make a lot of if Lisa could get it tasting right. Using sage, pepper, and maple syrup she found the perfect blend! We ended up hand cranking out about 60 pounds of wonderfully delicious mild sausage for the freezer! We have already enjoyed several wonderful meals with the sausage and tenderloin! We have a couple more hogs to butcher that we may do this weekend that we hope to make into more market cuts and less sausage.
Over this past weekend of Feb. 5th – 7th a big snow had been predicted (with possible 6 – 8 inches of white for our area) but it all turned into just rain, which resulted in some minor flodding around here.
Now here we are on February 9th in the midst of our next true winter storm. So far we only have about an inch of snow/ice but the national weather service has issued a winter storm warning for us through tomorrow night with another 3 to 5 inches expected! If the temps cooperate this week, I may be able to boil down some more maple syrup. Yesterday was above freezing and today is expected to rise also as the precipitation changes to rain/freezing rain and then wind chills near zero for tonight, with another warmer day tomorrow. Will it make for a good sap flow? I love it when we can get things done in the middle of winter storms! It makes the storms so much more exciting and enjoyable! (Maybe I’m a bit strange?)
My thoughts and prayers go out to the folks in the DC area, though, who are really getting hammered. I’ve heard that they got about 3 feet of snow from that weekend system and are bracing for another 10 inches from this current system.
Here at Pure Water Hollow, God has been very good to us, and we have been enjoying our winter (more or less). God bless everyone!
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3 comments
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jrejhkids on February 9, 2010 at 8:55 am
We haven't butchered our own hogs yet. Maybe someday. We have butchered some goats and put in the freezer. It is work to do your own meat.
I enjoyed reading your entry. My son left Berea before that last big storm. He spent the week between short term and spring term with his aunt and uncle in Fort Mitchell, KY. He said when he got back that there were huge piles on snow in the parking lots.
We have been getting more snow than we usually do out here. We have had 13 1/2 inches, when we normally get 4-5 inches of snow. We have also had a lot of rain. Hopefully we get more in the mountains so that we have water to irrigate this year.
~Cheryl
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sassyfras on February 9, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Always glad to read your posts, we also have and are having snow. The good thing is around here the more snow we have in Feb. the better the mushroom hunting. I'm not sure as to why but it always happens. Hope you and your family stay well. sherry
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Schatzi on February 9, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Wow…what a crazy winter you are all having. We have had no snow this year…and it's a year for the Olympics here…just bizarre that's for sure.
Thankful you all are fine.
Blessings,
Connie
The first big storm hit eastern Kentucky back on December 18th and 19th when we got about 6 inches of snow and ice here at our home. During this storm we left Pure Water Hollow to visit my mother for the holidays. This was another one of those wet snows that took down trees and power lines! We were only without power for a day or so (which didn’t affect us much since we were out of town) but some of our neighbors were without power through Christmas Day! Other areas were hit even harder and there were reports of students being stranded at their school in Harlan when the snow hit so quickly and it was not possible to get out. Some of those students actually had to stay the night at school!
We got some snow on December 30th and 31st but the next big storm was on January 4th and 5th when we had 5 to 6 inches of snow. During this time was very cold, with tempertures staying below freezing for 2 consecutive weeks. We saw huge ice bergs floating in our river, so if the cold snap had lasted much longer, the river may have frozen over like it did back in 94. But the cold didn’t hold on, and the lows never got below zero like it did in 94.
During this storm, we almost got snowed in at Harlan, KY because that was where our brake line broke as we were on our way home from a fantastic vacation in the Carribean. The brake-line stranded us the night before the storm, just three hours from home! We got it fixed and drove home the next day while the snow was still accumulating! The following days saw us wind down from the trip and get things unpacked and back to normal.
We had a couple of mild, warmer weeks when the maple sap began to flow and I was able to make a couple of jars of maple syrup, but then we had a huge 6-8 inch dry snow on January 29th and 30th. I only measured 6 on the ground here, (with some 10inch drifts) but other areas of our county reported 8 inches on the ground. This was the weekend we decided to butcher one of our hogs, which was cold, but made for a pretty setting also. We did everything ourselves again in our side yard, with Matthew doing the main work. From this 360 pound pig we got several good roasts, made the tenderloin into about 62 delicious thick slices, and are curing about 50 pounds of ham. Lisa also rendered out about 30 pounds of lard which we hope to use some of to make soap. The big success this time has been the sausage, which we wanted to make a lot of if Lisa could get it tasting right. Using sage, pepper, and maple syrup she found the perfect blend! We ended up hand cranking out about 60 pounds of wonderfully delicious mild sausage for the freezer! We have already enjoyed several wonderful meals with the sausage and tenderloin! We have a couple more hogs to butcher that we may do this weekend that we hope to make into more market cuts and less sausage.
Over this past weekend of Feb. 5th – 7th a big snow had been predicted (with possible 6 – 8 inches of white for our area) but it all turned into just rain, which resulted in some minor flodding around here.
Now here we are on February 9th in the midst of our next true winter storm. So far we only have about an inch of snow/ice but the national weather service has issued a winter storm warning for us through tomorrow night with another 3 to 5 inches expected! If the temps cooperate this week, I may be able to boil down some more maple syrup. Yesterday was above freezing and today is expected to rise also as the precipitation changes to rain/freezing rain and then wind chills near zero for tonight, with another warmer day tomorrow. Will it make for a good sap flow? I love it when we can get things done in the middle of winter storms! It makes the storms so much more exciting and enjoyable! (Maybe I’m a bit strange?)
My thoughts and prayers go out to the folks in the DC area, though, who are really getting hammered. I’ve heard that they got about 3 feet of snow from that weekend system and are bracing for another 10 inches from this current system.
Here at Pure Water Hollow, God has been very good to us, and we have been enjoying our winter (more or less). God bless everyone!
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3 comments
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jrejhkids on February 9, 2010 at 8:55 am
We haven't butchered our own hogs yet. Maybe someday. We have butchered some goats and put in the freezer. It is work to do your own meat.
I enjoyed reading your entry. My son left Berea before that last big storm. He spent the week between short term and spring term with his aunt and uncle in Fort Mitchell, KY. He said when he got back that there were huge piles on snow in the parking lots.
We have been getting more snow than we usually do out here. We have had 13 1/2 inches, when we normally get 4-5 inches of snow. We have also had a lot of rain. Hopefully we get more in the mountains so that we have water to irrigate this year.
~Cheryl
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sassyfras on February 9, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Always glad to read your posts, we also have and are having snow. The good thing is around here the more snow we have in Feb. the better the mushroom hunting. I'm not sure as to why but it always happens. Hope you and your family stay well. sherry
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Schatzi on February 9, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Wow…what a crazy winter you are all having. We have had no snow this year…and it's a year for the Olympics here…just bizarre that's for sure.
Thankful you all are fine.
Blessings,
Connie
Friday, February 29, 2008
Maple Syrup and Misc Stuff
(The following is from correspondence between myself and another homestead blogger.)
——————————
Original message from stitchesbyteresa:
I just read a blog from "Belle" about tapping maple trees for syrup. She told me she got the info from your blog. I live in N. Ga and wasnt sure if this is something I could do w/maple trees here. Does it have to be a certain type of maple tree, I really don't know much about it. Also, how big does the tree need to be before tapping it…and how far up would I measure? Your pics of the candy and sugar and syrup were beautiful!
I will keep your wife and newest addition in my prayers. I also noticed you took your wife to see Doyle Lawson for valentine's day…My hubby would have loved that! He is a bluegrasser through and through…banjo picker…
ANYWAY, thanks for sharing your part of the world.
The little piglets are so cute. I dont think I could raise them b/c I'd get too attached to them, especially seeing them play w/the chickens and all. Of course I never ate the chickens I raised growing up, I just cried when my dad would kill one for supper! Somehow I was always able to eat the turkeys of which I had no part in raising…silly on my part, I know…congratulations on that new baby boy!!!
Teresa
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Teresa,
I'm glad you've enjoyed the blog. I'll add you to our friend list.
No one around here (in eastern Kentucky) knew anything about making maple syrup. Anyone I asked about it thought we would be too far south, but I couldn't find any explanation as to why it wouldn't work where we were. We have sugar maple trees. I just decided to give it a try and see, and I was glad that we did!
What I've read is that you have to have successive freezing nights with above freezing days. We have plenty of those in Kentucky. I wonder what happens to the sap if the trees do not experience weather like that. I also wonder how far south maple trees grow? (I think I'll look that up after I send this.) I'm guessing that a sugar maple tree is a sugar maple tree and a sugar maple tree should have sweet sap just before spring no matter where it is growing.
The trees have to measure at least 32 inches around about waist high, from what I've read (a 10-12 inch diameter, but I thought measuring around was easier).
Apparenly sugar maple trees are the best, but they say any maple tree can be tapped. I think it might take a larger amount of sap to make the syrup with other maple trees, but we did not try any other. (Actually I did tap a box elder tree (also called ash-leaf maple) but the sap tasted so bitter, we did not bother boiling it down into syrup. Maybe I will another year, because maybe it would make good syrup even though the sap tasted horrible by itself?)
We enjoyed Doyle Lawson very much. It was our first time seeing him. I love bluegrass gospel and bluegrass music, but I don't care much for break-up songs or drinking songs even if the instrumentation is great pickin. The group that was with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver was a group called Fast Lane. I think they are an up and coming bluegrass group and are quite talented. Their big song, however, is "Tina At the Tear Drop Inn" about a husband committing adultry with Tina at the Tear Drop Inn and his wife follows him and shoots him dead. In a lot of ways it was a good song, but it is really a bad song, if that makes sense?
Thank you for praying for us. It is very much appreciated, and we will pray for you. Glad to hear that the bone scan was ok.
God Bless,
Eric
——————————
Original message from stitchesbyteresa:
I just read a blog from "Belle" about tapping maple trees for syrup. She told me she got the info from your blog. I live in N. Ga and wasnt sure if this is something I could do w/maple trees here. Does it have to be a certain type of maple tree, I really don't know much about it. Also, how big does the tree need to be before tapping it…and how far up would I measure? Your pics of the candy and sugar and syrup were beautiful!
I will keep your wife and newest addition in my prayers. I also noticed you took your wife to see Doyle Lawson for valentine's day…My hubby would have loved that! He is a bluegrasser through and through…banjo picker…
ANYWAY, thanks for sharing your part of the world.
The little piglets are so cute. I dont think I could raise them b/c I'd get too attached to them, especially seeing them play w/the chickens and all. Of course I never ate the chickens I raised growing up, I just cried when my dad would kill one for supper! Somehow I was always able to eat the turkeys of which I had no part in raising…silly on my part, I know…congratulations on that new baby boy!!!
Teresa
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Teresa,
I'm glad you've enjoyed the blog. I'll add you to our friend list.
No one around here (in eastern Kentucky) knew anything about making maple syrup. Anyone I asked about it thought we would be too far south, but I couldn't find any explanation as to why it wouldn't work where we were. We have sugar maple trees. I just decided to give it a try and see, and I was glad that we did!
What I've read is that you have to have successive freezing nights with above freezing days. We have plenty of those in Kentucky. I wonder what happens to the sap if the trees do not experience weather like that. I also wonder how far south maple trees grow? (I think I'll look that up after I send this.) I'm guessing that a sugar maple tree is a sugar maple tree and a sugar maple tree should have sweet sap just before spring no matter where it is growing.
The trees have to measure at least 32 inches around about waist high, from what I've read (a 10-12 inch diameter, but I thought measuring around was easier).
Apparenly sugar maple trees are the best, but they say any maple tree can be tapped. I think it might take a larger amount of sap to make the syrup with other maple trees, but we did not try any other. (Actually I did tap a box elder tree (also called ash-leaf maple) but the sap tasted so bitter, we did not bother boiling it down into syrup. Maybe I will another year, because maybe it would make good syrup even though the sap tasted horrible by itself?)
We enjoyed Doyle Lawson very much. It was our first time seeing him. I love bluegrass gospel and bluegrass music, but I don't care much for break-up songs or drinking songs even if the instrumentation is great pickin. The group that was with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver was a group called Fast Lane. I think they are an up and coming bluegrass group and are quite talented. Their big song, however, is "Tina At the Tear Drop Inn" about a husband committing adultry with Tina at the Tear Drop Inn and his wife follows him and shoots him dead. In a lot of ways it was a good song, but it is really a bad song, if that makes sense?
Thank you for praying for us. It is very much appreciated, and we will pray for you. Glad to hear that the bone scan was ok.
God Bless,
Eric
Sunday, February 17, 2008
The Valentine Weekend Sap Flow '08: A Concluding Summary
I thought I would post again about the maple sap collecting, just in case we don’t remember things real clearly next year when we try to do this again. For us, the 08 maple syrup season started the first weekend of February and we got about 40 gallons of sap on the 2nd and 3rd. There were a few days when the taps dripped some, but it was nothing like it was on the 2nd and 3rd and we didn’t bother to try and collect anything. Our temperatures were consistently above freezing until the 10th and then the temperatures dropped and stayed pretty much consistantly below freezing until the 14th.
I had posted on the 14th about hanging the buckets back on the maple trees in the snow. That was Thursday. On the actual day of Valentines we only collected about 2 gallons from the 8 trees we have tapped this first year. We had snow all day on Wednesday and well below freezing temperatures. Thursday it was near 40 degrees but back below freezing Thursday night. Friday saw a wonderful day with temperatures in the 50s. Then the trees really decided to start flowing.
We collected 10 full gallons of sap Friday by noon and another 10 full gallons Friday evening around 6:00. Friday night was in the 20s and Saturday was another beautiful day in the 50s. Saturday saw another great effort on the part of the maple trees with 10 gallons again collected in the morning around 10:30 and another 10 gallons collected around 5:00 in the evening. Saturday night the temperatures stayed near 40 for a low and that apparently stopped the flow for the most part. When Matthew checked the buckets this morning there was only an inch or so in each bucket. Today was warm and rainy and not much more sap came into the buckets. Matthew went up at dark and said he probably could have filled up a 5 gallon bucket, but it was too dark by that time. We may go and get it tomorrow, but it has set out all day in warm weather (60s today) and tonight is not getting very cold. I don’t know if that sap up in the buckets on the tree will still be good.
I have been boiling the sap off and on all day Friday, Saturday, and today. I have found that it is not exactly a 50 to 1 ratio like I thought last time. It is more than 40:1 but a bit less than 50:1. I am still using 50:1 but I am having a bit more than a half pint from each 3 gallon batch of syrup, which is nice. I can fill each jar all the way to the brim and then I save the left over for another jar later. Out of the 42 gallons of sap this weekend, I have made 9 half pint jars of maple syrup so far with about 5 still to go. Six gallons of sap are boiling right now and we have about 9 gallons of sap still in waiting. And that is not counting what we left at the sugar bush, if it is still good.
I feel like I have the system of syrup making down pretty good this time. It has not been as difficult or confusing this go around. The super sweet, pure and natural, maple syrup is worth the trouble. And it has been fun, too!
I had posted on the 14th about hanging the buckets back on the maple trees in the snow. That was Thursday. On the actual day of Valentines we only collected about 2 gallons from the 8 trees we have tapped this first year. We had snow all day on Wednesday and well below freezing temperatures. Thursday it was near 40 degrees but back below freezing Thursday night. Friday saw a wonderful day with temperatures in the 50s. Then the trees really decided to start flowing.
We collected 10 full gallons of sap Friday by noon and another 10 full gallons Friday evening around 6:00. Friday night was in the 20s and Saturday was another beautiful day in the 50s. Saturday saw another great effort on the part of the maple trees with 10 gallons again collected in the morning around 10:30 and another 10 gallons collected around 5:00 in the evening. Saturday night the temperatures stayed near 40 for a low and that apparently stopped the flow for the most part. When Matthew checked the buckets this morning there was only an inch or so in each bucket. Today was warm and rainy and not much more sap came into the buckets. Matthew went up at dark and said he probably could have filled up a 5 gallon bucket, but it was too dark by that time. We may go and get it tomorrow, but it has set out all day in warm weather (60s today) and tonight is not getting very cold. I don’t know if that sap up in the buckets on the tree will still be good.
I have been boiling the sap off and on all day Friday, Saturday, and today. I have found that it is not exactly a 50 to 1 ratio like I thought last time. It is more than 40:1 but a bit less than 50:1. I am still using 50:1 but I am having a bit more than a half pint from each 3 gallon batch of syrup, which is nice. I can fill each jar all the way to the brim and then I save the left over for another jar later. Out of the 42 gallons of sap this weekend, I have made 9 half pint jars of maple syrup so far with about 5 still to go. Six gallons of sap are boiling right now and we have about 9 gallons of sap still in waiting. And that is not counting what we left at the sugar bush, if it is still good.
I feel like I have the system of syrup making down pretty good this time. It has not been as difficult or confusing this go around. The super sweet, pure and natural, maple syrup is worth the trouble. And it has been fun, too!
Thursday, February 14, 2008
A Sweet Valentine's Day (Of the Maple Variety!)
I hope everyone has had a wonderful Valentine’s Day today! Here at Pure Water Hollow, I think we may have started a new tradition for Valentine’s Day: maple candy from our own maple trees. I have posted previously about our first attempts at tapping our sugar maple trees and converting the sap into maple syrup. We successfully accomplished that earlier in February, but I still wanted to try to make maple sugar and maple candy. What better day to try than Valentine’s Day?
Today was a neat day to collect sap because we had snow on the ground like they do in New England when they do their sap gathering. I wanted to use today’s sap to make the maple candy, but the trees just wouldn’t cooperate as much as they did two weekends ago. We did get almost two gallons of sap today, which yielded about 6 ounces of syrup, but it wasn’t until late in the day. Here is a picture of one of our maple trees in the snow with a bucket waiting to be filled up. Our dog, Mammoo, is protecting the area I hope:
Since the sap didn’t come today early enough to make candy, I used some of the syrup from our previous sugaring day. We decided to experiment with one of the jars that we had boiled a bit too long which had caused the syrup to crystal up. I spooned it into a pan and heated it up on the stove. I was surprised how quickly it came to a boil, and how quickly the temperature raised to well above boiling.
I was trying for soft maple candy and I had read that you should bring it to about 30 degrees above boiling. Then you should let it cool in another pan until the temperature dropped back down to about 200 degrees and then stir it until it became a plastic consistency. It reached above 230 degrees very quickly. It also cooled very quickly; too quickly in fact! Maybe it was because I was using such a small amount (just a half pint). It turned to a plastic consitency so quickly that it started to harden before I could pour it into the molds. Instead I packed it into the molds which worked ok, but wasn’t exactly what I had wanted.
Here is a picture of the first maple candy made at Pure Water Hollow Homestead:
I don’t know if the candies turned out perfect, but they sure were good! They had a “melt in your mouth gradually” sensation, sort of like those soft peppermints you can get that fall apart as you suck them. I think the children loved these maple hearts for Valentine’s Day! And the amazing thing is that it is 100% all natural, straight from the tree!
I will need to try the process some more to perfect it. I’ve read that if you are able to pour the syrup the outside will have a glossy look to it, which I think would be better.
Something I was more pleased with than the candy, was the maple sugar I made. After the candy had hardened too much to be able to put into any more molds, I decided to see what would happen if I crushed the remainder of it into powder. Maybe it would resemble sugar? I crushed and sifted it and it stayed dry and fluffy, just like granulated sugar! Maybe I got it finer than granulated sugar? I was very happy with it! Here are a couple of pictures of the first maple powdered sugar made at Pure Water Hollow:
This sugar should work as well as store bought white sugar, but I believe it is much healthier! It is 100% natural and organic, but it is oh so sweet!
I also took a picture of the new syrup bottle I bought today next to the sugar bowl. The syrup that is in the bottle is Valentine’s Day maple syrup made today from Valentine’s Day maple sap collected today!
Today has been a nice Valentine’s Day but I am really looking forward to celebrating with my Valentine this Saturday evening. I am taking Lisa to dinner and a Doyle Lawson concert while Erica babysits for us. I am so in love with my wife, Lisa! I can’t really put into words how I feel, but I know that I have so much more than I deserve! A beautiful woman who loves and cares for me and who allows me to love her. I feel like God has blessed me greater than He could ever bless anyone else!
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4 comments
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Mom on February 15, 2008 at 8:03 am
That was a nice post! We have not gotten any sap this week. Today is going to be a bit warmer, so maybe today we will get sap.I ordered 20 more spots from Lehmans, but they are back ordered. I was hoping to have them for this weekend.
The candy and sugar look good!
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Debbie on February 15, 2008 at 8:57 am
My it look like you are having too much fun. It also looks like you are busy around the homestead. Your maple sugar reminded me when I bought some maple sugar. It was great. I loved putting it in my tea to have the extra flavor of maple. Great stuff. I've never had maple candy though. I'm glad to see that things are good at the homestead. Thanks for posting all this wonderful information.
Debbie
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Schatzi on February 15, 2008 at 11:48 am
What a great post….reminds me of my grandparents letting us help make maple syrup and candy.
Have a great "date night"
Connie
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Chas on February 15, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Hi there! I was just thinking about you guys and how you should be getting close to having a new little one very soon! I am glad to read that you are all doing well.
That candy and sugar looks wonderful… I would love to do something like that!
You are an inspiration!!!
Have a great weekend!
Chas
Today was a neat day to collect sap because we had snow on the ground like they do in New England when they do their sap gathering. I wanted to use today’s sap to make the maple candy, but the trees just wouldn’t cooperate as much as they did two weekends ago. We did get almost two gallons of sap today, which yielded about 6 ounces of syrup, but it wasn’t until late in the day. Here is a picture of one of our maple trees in the snow with a bucket waiting to be filled up. Our dog, Mammoo, is protecting the area I hope:
Since the sap didn’t come today early enough to make candy, I used some of the syrup from our previous sugaring day. We decided to experiment with one of the jars that we had boiled a bit too long which had caused the syrup to crystal up. I spooned it into a pan and heated it up on the stove. I was surprised how quickly it came to a boil, and how quickly the temperature raised to well above boiling.
I was trying for soft maple candy and I had read that you should bring it to about 30 degrees above boiling. Then you should let it cool in another pan until the temperature dropped back down to about 200 degrees and then stir it until it became a plastic consistency. It reached above 230 degrees very quickly. It also cooled very quickly; too quickly in fact! Maybe it was because I was using such a small amount (just a half pint). It turned to a plastic consitency so quickly that it started to harden before I could pour it into the molds. Instead I packed it into the molds which worked ok, but wasn’t exactly what I had wanted.
Here is a picture of the first maple candy made at Pure Water Hollow Homestead:
I don’t know if the candies turned out perfect, but they sure were good! They had a “melt in your mouth gradually” sensation, sort of like those soft peppermints you can get that fall apart as you suck them. I think the children loved these maple hearts for Valentine’s Day! And the amazing thing is that it is 100% all natural, straight from the tree!
I will need to try the process some more to perfect it. I’ve read that if you are able to pour the syrup the outside will have a glossy look to it, which I think would be better.
Something I was more pleased with than the candy, was the maple sugar I made. After the candy had hardened too much to be able to put into any more molds, I decided to see what would happen if I crushed the remainder of it into powder. Maybe it would resemble sugar? I crushed and sifted it and it stayed dry and fluffy, just like granulated sugar! Maybe I got it finer than granulated sugar? I was very happy with it! Here are a couple of pictures of the first maple powdered sugar made at Pure Water Hollow:
This sugar should work as well as store bought white sugar, but I believe it is much healthier! It is 100% natural and organic, but it is oh so sweet!
I also took a picture of the new syrup bottle I bought today next to the sugar bowl. The syrup that is in the bottle is Valentine’s Day maple syrup made today from Valentine’s Day maple sap collected today!
Today has been a nice Valentine’s Day but I am really looking forward to celebrating with my Valentine this Saturday evening. I am taking Lisa to dinner and a Doyle Lawson concert while Erica babysits for us. I am so in love with my wife, Lisa! I can’t really put into words how I feel, but I know that I have so much more than I deserve! A beautiful woman who loves and cares for me and who allows me to love her. I feel like God has blessed me greater than He could ever bless anyone else!
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4 comments
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Mom on February 15, 2008 at 8:03 am
That was a nice post! We have not gotten any sap this week. Today is going to be a bit warmer, so maybe today we will get sap.I ordered 20 more spots from Lehmans, but they are back ordered. I was hoping to have them for this weekend.
The candy and sugar look good!
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Debbie on February 15, 2008 at 8:57 am
My it look like you are having too much fun. It also looks like you are busy around the homestead. Your maple sugar reminded me when I bought some maple sugar. It was great. I loved putting it in my tea to have the extra flavor of maple. Great stuff. I've never had maple candy though. I'm glad to see that things are good at the homestead. Thanks for posting all this wonderful information.
Debbie
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Schatzi on February 15, 2008 at 11:48 am
What a great post….reminds me of my grandparents letting us help make maple syrup and candy.
Have a great "date night"
Connie
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Chas on February 15, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Hi there! I was just thinking about you guys and how you should be getting close to having a new little one very soon! I am glad to read that you are all doing well.
That candy and sugar looks wonderful… I would love to do something like that!
You are an inspiration!!!
Have a great weekend!
Chas
Collecting Maple Sap (In Authentic Snow!)
I love those pictures you see of folks collecting the maple tree sap in the New England area. There is always a big snow covering the ground, sometimes with drifts! Well, we don’t get that much snow very often here in eastern Kentucky, but we got a surprise inch or two yesterday. I had been planning for several days on hanging our buckets on our maple trees today, mainly because of the predicted temperature being in the 40s for highs. Last night it was about 25 degrees and we had gotten down into the teens before that. A nice warm day like today should get the sap to start flowing again.
After we got the snow yesterday, I was even more excited about hanging the buckets. It would feel so much more “authentic” to go trapsing through some snow covered woods to obtain the maple sap! We didn’t go up to the sugar bush until about 10:00am. The golden sun was shining and the temperature was starting to peek above 30 degrees. The snow, however, remained a still, white blanket covering the forest, making the scenery around us sparkle in the sun. The Lord also painted the most beautiful blue sky you can imagine, to contrast the glaring white of the snow. No Norman Rockwell painting ever looked this peaceful.
The pictures we took can’t do the reality any justice, but I was happy to take them anyway. I loved the thought of collecting maple sap with snow on the ground! I had two very good helpers with me on this fine Valentine’s Day adventure.
Here is Christina next to one of the trees:
And here is Matthew:
Christina took this picture of a frozen spout with snow on it before Matthew and I got up there:
Here is shot of Matthew and Christina from a distance:
I really like this picture. I thought it was artistic, with the fallen tree in the foreground covered with snow and the blue sky in the background above the ridge. The beautiful girl in the middle of the picture with the sap bucket makes it even better!
Speaking of that beautiful girl, when Christina got thirsty, she decided to eat some of the snow!
But you better be careful walking on steep hillsides in the snow! Matthew, Christina, and I each slipped and fell at least once as we climbed up and down the slick slopes. Christina got up too quickly for me to get a picture, but here she is in a good re-dramatization of her fall:
Our dogs usually come up with us whenever we go up in the mountains. Luna was there, with Chief and Mammoo, but I did not get a picture of her today. Here is one of Chief and Mammoo with Matthew:
And how about one more shot of the dogs. You can see a bit more of what the snow covered woods looked like in the background:
The sap flow was not very strong after all, today. The temperature did not get much above freezing until pretty late in the day. It did peak out at 48 degrees about 4:00pm and that was when most of the sap we collected probably flowed. There were still patches of snow all around when we gathered almost 2 gallons of sap at 6:00pm. The trees were all dripping, but nothing like they were on the 2nd and 3rd of February when we collected about 40 gallons. The sap may continue to flow through the night because it is not supposed to get below freezing, so we may be able to make more syrup tomorrow. Tonight we could only make about 6 ounces of syrup.
Along with the syrup, I also made some maple candy and maple sugar tonight, in celebration of Valentine’s Day. I am going to put those few pictures on my next post.
I am thankful for so much on this Valentine’s Day. I am thankful for the maple trees and for the snow, but I am mostly thankful for the love of the one who created them both and did so much more. God loved us so much that He sent Jesus to die (and raise from the dead) so that our sins that were scarlet could be made white as snow! There is nothing so sweet as that!
After we got the snow yesterday, I was even more excited about hanging the buckets. It would feel so much more “authentic” to go trapsing through some snow covered woods to obtain the maple sap! We didn’t go up to the sugar bush until about 10:00am. The golden sun was shining and the temperature was starting to peek above 30 degrees. The snow, however, remained a still, white blanket covering the forest, making the scenery around us sparkle in the sun. The Lord also painted the most beautiful blue sky you can imagine, to contrast the glaring white of the snow. No Norman Rockwell painting ever looked this peaceful.
The pictures we took can’t do the reality any justice, but I was happy to take them anyway. I loved the thought of collecting maple sap with snow on the ground! I had two very good helpers with me on this fine Valentine’s Day adventure.
Here is Christina next to one of the trees:
And here is Matthew:
Christina took this picture of a frozen spout with snow on it before Matthew and I got up there:
Here is shot of Matthew and Christina from a distance:
I really like this picture. I thought it was artistic, with the fallen tree in the foreground covered with snow and the blue sky in the background above the ridge. The beautiful girl in the middle of the picture with the sap bucket makes it even better!
Speaking of that beautiful girl, when Christina got thirsty, she decided to eat some of the snow!
But you better be careful walking on steep hillsides in the snow! Matthew, Christina, and I each slipped and fell at least once as we climbed up and down the slick slopes. Christina got up too quickly for me to get a picture, but here she is in a good re-dramatization of her fall:
Our dogs usually come up with us whenever we go up in the mountains. Luna was there, with Chief and Mammoo, but I did not get a picture of her today. Here is one of Chief and Mammoo with Matthew:
And how about one more shot of the dogs. You can see a bit more of what the snow covered woods looked like in the background:
The sap flow was not very strong after all, today. The temperature did not get much above freezing until pretty late in the day. It did peak out at 48 degrees about 4:00pm and that was when most of the sap we collected probably flowed. There were still patches of snow all around when we gathered almost 2 gallons of sap at 6:00pm. The trees were all dripping, but nothing like they were on the 2nd and 3rd of February when we collected about 40 gallons. The sap may continue to flow through the night because it is not supposed to get below freezing, so we may be able to make more syrup tomorrow. Tonight we could only make about 6 ounces of syrup.
Along with the syrup, I also made some maple candy and maple sugar tonight, in celebration of Valentine’s Day. I am going to put those few pictures on my next post.
I am thankful for so much on this Valentine’s Day. I am thankful for the maple trees and for the snow, but I am mostly thankful for the love of the one who created them both and did so much more. God loved us so much that He sent Jesus to die (and raise from the dead) so that our sins that were scarlet could be made white as snow! There is nothing so sweet as that!
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Here We Go A Sugaring
I wanted to record some of the details of our maple syrup making at Pure Water Hollow, especially for any of our generations who may live here in the future and may want (or need) to process their own maple syrup/sugar.
I am amazed that it took us living here this long to realize that we have a very impressive “sugar bush” up at the head of the hollow. There are dozens of large maple trees in close proximity to each other where we used to call the “turn around spot”, or “the bowl”. Now we will call it the “sugar bush” or the “sugar bowl”! I’m not sure how many are truly sugar maple trees, but my guess would be 20 or more tapping size.
I don’t know if anyone planted the maples up there purposely or if they are just products of the forest, but it does seem that they were intentionally left here when the property was last logged in the 80s. We are grateful to whoever had such foresight in the past. Since maple trees grow so slowly, it would appear that some of our trees are well over 100 years old. I have read that it takes between 30 and 50 years for the trees to grow big enough to be good for tapping!
Once the trees were identified, we started reading up on the process. Carla Emery has a few good pages in The Encyclopedia of Country Living about making maple syrup. (Is there anything that she did not touch on?) There are also several great resources on the web. I especially liked the ones from Ohio State University and University of Cincinnati since they are not very much farther north than we are here. (I couldn’t get the pictures to load on the one from UC but it was still good info.)We also used the one from the University of Maine and a site from Massachusetts.
We found several places online that sell spouts for tapping, but we decided to order from our old friend, Lehman’s. They cost $1.80 a piece there if you buy them in quantities of 10. Ebay had some for less, but I didn’t feel very comfortable with the looks of any of those, and there were many used ones for sale, but I decided I would rather go with the new.
Here is a picture of some of the spouts with the hooks attached:
We would like to try to make some wooden spouts some day. I have read that elderberry stems are easy to carve and hollow out for spouts and we have many elderberry trees growing around Pure Water Hollow. Maybe some year in the future we will see if we can make maple syrup using all wooden spouts, hand drills, and wood fires, with no modern conveniences, just for fun!
We also purchased an iron spout driver to use to gently tap the spouts into the tap hole. I can’t imagine not using this tool, even though I've read that it is not necessary. I would be afraid of messing up the spout if I just tried to hammer it in without the driver. This item was expensive at Lehman’s, but averaged out if we had to spend extra shipping to just buy it alone from another source. We bought it from Lehman’s for $12.95 but I saw the same thing for $6.95 other places.
It is nicer to have a small hammer to tap the spouts into the hole you drill instead of using a rock. I used this one that had belonged to my dad:
These spouts go with a 7/16” drill bit that I did not own. I bought an inexpensive one (Hitachi) at Lowe’s for about $7.00 that worked wonderfully. I also bought an expensive one for $14.00 (Stanley) just to compare and have an extra. I could not tell that the expensive one worked any better. Maybe it will last for many more years? If we only drill 10 or 20 holes with it a year, I would imagine that both bits will last for decades or longer!
We drilled the holes into the trees only about 2 1/2” deep, but we did not measure. We just stuck the drill in and pulled it out and noted how far the wood was sticking on the bit. If it looked like it was less than 2” we stuck it back in a little farther.
Here are the drills we used with the drill bits:
The hand drill belonged to my grandfather and still works well. I am thankful to have it. It, however, was amazingly harder to use than the portable power drill. It really took a good effort to drill a hole. We drilled one hole with the old-fashioned hand drill, just to know that we can do it, but then we drilled all the others with the power drill. The power drill only took about 2 seconds to drill each hole. Very little force was needed and it was extremely easy to use with the trees. (We are really spoiled today in the 21st century, aren’t we?)
You can collect the sap in anything, really. I know the old timers used metal pails and before that, wooden ones. I looked at buying some used metal pails online, but they were so expensive and most that I found looked like they would have rust spots in them. I did not want to use something that would compromise the syrup, even if it were old-fashioned.
I decided to buy nice, new, plastic buckets at Lowe’s. They sell clear 3.5-gallon buckets that can have a lid snap on them for under $4.00 each. If you want a lid you have to buy them separate. (The same lids are cheaper at Wal-Mart than Lowe’s for $1.24 each I think.) I guess I put about $50.00 into buying the 10 buckets and lids we used, but I did not buy them all at one time.
So that’s all the equipment you need to tap your sugar maples: a drill with a 7/16” bit, a spout for each hole you drill, a small hammer and a spout driver to tap the spout firmly into the hole, and buckets of some kind to collect the sap.
We tapped the trees when the flow was on and sap began gushing out of each hole before we could even get the spouts in! It was sunny and warming up quickly at 9:30 Saturday morning. The night before was another freezing night about 20 degrees. These are the perfect conditions for tapping. I know they tap their trees in March or April up north, but I figured that here in Kentucky, we only have about a month until we start having everyday spring weather, so now was a good time. I do think that there will be some other good days in February that the trees could still be tapped here at our location. We just need to have the good freezes at night followed by sunny, warm daytime temperatures.
This may be a good place to note that the sap flow stopped sometime overnight Sunday. Friday night was 20 degrees, Saturday got up in the mid 40s, Saturday night was back in the 20s with a heavy frost, and Sunday got up into the 60s! We collected about 35-40 gallons of sap during Saturday and Sunday from the 10 taps and then Sunday night it stayed in the upper 40s. Monday we had a nice day in the mid 60s again. When Matthew went up in the afternoon to check on the buckets, there was almost no more sap in them than what he had left Sunday (when his transporting buckets were full), and the sap did not flow any more today.
We had read that the sap was supposed to stop when the temperatures stay warm for a prolonged time or when they stay cold for a prolonged time, and I guess that highs in the 60s and lows in the 40s was too warm. I think the sap will flow again the next time we have a night in the 20s followed by the day in the 40s. (We may not collect anymore sap, though. Even though it was only for a couple of days, the family is getting tired of the intense schedule. We will see how everyone in the family feels at that time, but it has been some long work to get the syrup out of the sap.)
We had our first few gallons of sap before noon on Saturday. I had read that it takes 40 or 50 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. Using the 40:1 ratio we figured that it would take 2.5 gallons of sap to fill a half-pint mason jar (8 ounces). After we boiled that down and it only made about 6 ounces, we increased up to the 50:1 ratio. This meant that we would need 3 gallons of sap to make 1 half-pint, and this is what we have used for the rest of the batches. Sometimes it has made a bit more than 8 ounces, but it seems to be pretty close.
I also had purchased a $4.95 candy thermometer to use in this experiment because I kept reading that the syrup should boil at 7 degrees hotter than the first sap. You should be able to note the exact temperature that water, or the first sap, boils at and then keep adding more sap as the water is steamed away. Theoretically, when the boiling temperature got 7 degrees hotter, we would know that we now have maple syrup.
This did not work for us, I guess because the thermometer was not marked off in that precise of increments. I could not really tell what the exact temperature was. I was a bit surprised that water boils here in our location somewhere between 200 degrees and 205 degrees. For some reason I thought that 212 degrees was an official constant boiling temperature of water no matter where you are. (So much for public education, even though I went to a good school. Or maybe that shows that I do not do much cooking?)
Anyway, we decided to use the ratio approach and boil down the sap in “batches”. We filled up our 21-quart stockpots with 3 gallons of sap, filtered through a couple layers of cheesecloth, and started them boiling. We found that our hottest heat source is the electric range in the kitchen. Our propane grill and Coleman camp stove had served the purpose, but took a long time. The day got dark on us up at our “sugar camp” and we still had plenty of sap to boil.
We stayed up there for quite a while Saturday night, boiling down the sap. Matthew made a nice campfire and we had supper under the bright stars. The clear winter sky was breathtaking.
It is still winter, however, and as I wrote earlier, it was dipping back into the 20s on this evening. Even with the fire and the stoves, we decided to move the operation to our nice warm kitchen. (I did have a dream after I went to bed that I was still up at the sugar camp sleeping on a bed of leaves. I was calling down to the house on our 2-way radios that I was going to sleep up there while waiting for the next batch of syrup to be made. Funny how my subconscious brain works at times during sleep!)
I had read in many places not to boil the sap in doors. At least one source said that all the steam would coat everything in the house with a sticky residue. After letting many gallons of sap boil on our kitchen range, I would now say the sticky residue part is a myth. After thinking about it, it doesn’t make sense that the steam would be sticky since the only thing that is boiling away in the steam is the water content. The tree sap is 98% water and only 2% sugar. About 2/3 of the water needs to be taken out. The remaining solution would be 66-67% sugar and would now be syrup. The only thing that is evaporated into the air is all that water. (Lisa later disagreed with this point. She says that we did mess up the kitchen with stickiness. I guess I didn't notice since I wasn't the one who cleaned it up!)
The only problem we had boiling all that water in-doors was the humidity. Most of the cabinets in the kitchen had moisture droplets form on them, and sometimes it was quite heavy. In some ways the humidity was not completely a problem here, however. We heat the house with propane so we usually have air that is too dry. The added moisture to the air did us some good, I think. We did have a fan on and cracked open a window and the kitchen door from time to time to ventilate out the steam.
Some day, I would like to have plenty of wood cut up to use in our wood stove that we could use outside, or even build something that would resemble the old-time sugar camps. It does make sense why folks who operate large operations build a regular “sugar house” or “sugar shack” to do all this boiling in and to also be warm while doing it in the winter. We have the space to build such a structure, and the shack could double as a hunting cabin. Hmmm…..
So we have three gallons of maple tree sap in one large stockpot. It takes about an hour to bring this quantity to just a simmering boil. I stir the pot every now and then so I feel like I am doing something. Another 2 or 3 hours pass before there is a real noticeable difference in the quantity, and I have felt good stirring the pot and watching the bubbles during this time. (If you stir it in real fast circles, you can make the middle boil straight up like a small fountain. Pretty cool!)
At this point it has evaporated enough to be moved into a 3 quart sauce pan, and we have to start watching it closer, stirring every now and then (partly to feel like I am doing something).
Here is a picture of one of the stockpots boiling:
and here it is in the smaller sauce pan:
The sap tastes like very lightly sweetened water right out of the tree and we enjoyed tasting the solution as it changed after every couple of hours of heating. As time progresses the drink gets sweeter and sweeter. We have thought that it might be nice to stop at a point far before syrup and just enjoy the sap as a very good and sweet drink by itself! I wonder what it would taste like on ice?
After about another hour it has really gotten to be a small amount, maybe 4 or 5 cups, and I like moving the contents to a smaller pot. Now I think stirring is very important to make sure the sugar content doesn’t settle on the bottom and get scorched. We did not have any to scorch, but I can imagine it happening easily. When the pot only has a couple of cups of sap/syrup it starts foaming up vigorously. I figured out that this is when it is almost finished.
We accidentally turned a couple or three batches into maple sugar because we evidently boiled it just a bit too long. We do want to have some maple sugar, so we will come back to those jars and work them some more.
After it has foamed a bit, the contents have boiled down to about 8 ounces and just the right size to pour into a half-pint jar. We used the cheesecloth again to filter any of the “sugar sand” as we pour the very hot syrup into the jar. When we put the flat and the ring on we set the jar upside down to let the syrup help seal the jar, along with the heat. Somewhere I read that maple syrup will keep almost indefinitely if the seal is not broken.
We tried to have 3 “batches” going at all times. As we moved one batch to a smaller pot, we would fill up the large stockpot with another 3 gallons. Originally, I wanted to have 4 and 5 batches going at one time. We could fit two large 21-quart pots on the grill and our grill has another burner on the side, and the camp stove has two burners. What I discovered, however, is when you have all the burners going, none of them are as hot as if only one were burning, and I could barely get anything to boil.
One thing that I was unsure of, was when the sap would flow. Somehow I had gotten it in my mind that the sap could fill up the buckets in the middle of the night. Maybe it can if it does not get below freezing, but our experience this time was that the sap cut off after it got below freezing, and then started flowing again the next morning with the warm temperatures. This was a relief, as I was picturing having to get up in the middle of the freezing night and empty the sap buckets.
Something else I was not sure about, was leaving the half-boiled pots of sap overnight. After it was so late Saturday, we decided to just turn off the range and start it back up Sunday when we were able to pay attention to it. We have read that sap can spoil like milk, but I don’t think ours was affected by leaving it overnight. We tried to keep the other sap that was waiting to be boiled stored outside each night where it was still cool.
To be honest, most of our sap was boiled down on our electric range. Saturday was the only day we made a real “sugar camp” out in the woods. The boiling on Sunday was at the house with the electric range and an electric hot plate that has two burners. Lisa and the children also had them going most of the day yesterday while I was at work and they were doing school and today they are finishing the last batch of sap that we collected.
As you can imagine, we are not necessarily looking for more sap flow days right now, but give it a few more days, and maybe we will be up for it.
I should note the only true negative aspect to this experiment. Obviously, the energy it takes to make a relatively small amount of maple syrup is a factor. I am wondering if we will notice a spike in our electric bill from running the range so much. It is hard, if not impossible, to figure how much this maple syrup has actually cost us to produce. I do think that we could come up with enough wood for a fire and we could do the same thing outside and make maple syrup for free. This would make it much more labor intensive. The saw mills around here gives their slabs away for free and many folks say it is the best wood for heating, so that is an option for stocking up the wood supply.
Another negative might be the time required, but if you think about it, it really takes a lot of time invested for anything worthwhile.
I haven’t showed you any of the finished products yet. Here are some pictures of the jars. We still need to boil down the sap for one or two more jars, and at least one jar’s worth has been eaten in the form of sugar. We will have 12 or 13 half pint jars from the 40 or so gallons of sap, and I think that is pretty good!
This picture may be too dark to see the light amber color:
Here is a good picture comparing one that we boiled too long with one that seems to be perfect.
It has sugar crystallized in it. I think we can heat it back up, stir it quite a bit and pour it into sugar cakes. We do want to have regular sugar but we still have to work on that. I think we could crush the contents of the solid jar and pound it into powdered sugar if we want.
Here is a close up of one of the jars (a bit blurry). I wonder what grade it would be?
All in all I am well pleased. Not only have the children learned some great science lessons of the natural world God has created, but we have also discovered another valuable resource that God put here at Pure Water Hollow. It is good to know that natural sugar is available on our own property if it is needed or wanted.
We also know that it can be done very successfully. I think the future will see us perfect the art and I’m sure we will come up with more efficient methods of accomplishing the goal of making maple syrup.
This first attempt has been a sweet success!
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6 comments
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haflinger on February 5, 2008 at 10:12 am
I must say you did a great job in details..I might of missed it but , did you say anything about the different grades? and the ratio 40 to one? Like I said I might of missed it..
Here in Maine they haven't started yet..And many leave there sap lines up year round…
Thanks for sharing..
Blessings haflinger/Sister Brenda
Purewater's reply:
It seemed that ours was more on a 50:1 ratio. We started with 40:1 but had to increase it. Maybe the trees here in the south have a slightly lower sugar content? As far as Grading, we have no idea. So far we have graded it as liquid or solid. Either way it is very sweet. This was our first attempt at sugaring. We are not planning on selling anything, just using it for ourselves.
Edited by Purewater on Tuesday, February 5, 2008 at 10:44 AM
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Karen on February 5, 2008 at 11:07 am
Very well done. I've always been curious about this topic. Wow, a stack of pancakes with some of that dark syrup would be good right now.
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LittleHouse on February 5, 2008 at 12:47 pm
It looks like you all had a lot of fun! It's nice to families doing fun things together:)
I hope you enjoy a big stack of pancakes!!!
Ma
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Belle on February 5, 2008 at 2:27 pm
This has been educational and interesting. Thank you very much for sharing.
You have done much more than create maple syrup, you have created a memory that will live on for genterations. Your children most likely will talk of this time to their children and grandchildren and on and on.
We are going to order our spouts today. I looked a the ones Lehmans had just last week. It was exciting to see your post about this since we have been talking about doing it too.I hate the freezing nights, but now I want them back so that we can give syrup making a try.
maa's mom
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sheryl on February 5, 2008 at 3:10 pm
thanks for sharing this with us. I enjoyed reading it. I will be down Saturday for pancakes. LOL Just kidding. I would love to be able to do something like this. We have several maple trees here on the farm. What color does the sugar maple tree leaves turn in the fall? sheryl
Purewater's reply:
The leaves are orange/red in the fall, but ours have not been overly vibrant theses past few years. More of dull orange.
Edited by Purewater on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 9:32 AM
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Mom on February 6, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I ordered our spouts and a spout driver from Lehmans, yesterday. Thanks to you I ordered the spout driver. I did not see it in the cataloug with the spouts, so I knew nothing about a spout driver. We are getting colder weather again so maybe we will get to do some sap collecting too. My husband is going to put all the spouts in for us, but he does not know one tree from another. I will go along to point them out to him. We got our buckets two weeks ago at the Dollar Tree for a dollar each. They are 12 qt buckets with a handel. If you need more buckets and you have a Dollar Tree near you, you might want to check them out.
I am so ready to give it a try. Thanks for all the valuable information that you have shared here.
I will let you know how we do.
maa's mom
I am amazed that it took us living here this long to realize that we have a very impressive “sugar bush” up at the head of the hollow. There are dozens of large maple trees in close proximity to each other where we used to call the “turn around spot”, or “the bowl”. Now we will call it the “sugar bush” or the “sugar bowl”! I’m not sure how many are truly sugar maple trees, but my guess would be 20 or more tapping size.
I don’t know if anyone planted the maples up there purposely or if they are just products of the forest, but it does seem that they were intentionally left here when the property was last logged in the 80s. We are grateful to whoever had such foresight in the past. Since maple trees grow so slowly, it would appear that some of our trees are well over 100 years old. I have read that it takes between 30 and 50 years for the trees to grow big enough to be good for tapping!
Once the trees were identified, we started reading up on the process. Carla Emery has a few good pages in The Encyclopedia of Country Living about making maple syrup. (Is there anything that she did not touch on?) There are also several great resources on the web. I especially liked the ones from Ohio State University and University of Cincinnati since they are not very much farther north than we are here. (I couldn’t get the pictures to load on the one from UC but it was still good info.)We also used the one from the University of Maine and a site from Massachusetts.
We found several places online that sell spouts for tapping, but we decided to order from our old friend, Lehman’s. They cost $1.80 a piece there if you buy them in quantities of 10. Ebay had some for less, but I didn’t feel very comfortable with the looks of any of those, and there were many used ones for sale, but I decided I would rather go with the new.
Here is a picture of some of the spouts with the hooks attached:
We would like to try to make some wooden spouts some day. I have read that elderberry stems are easy to carve and hollow out for spouts and we have many elderberry trees growing around Pure Water Hollow. Maybe some year in the future we will see if we can make maple syrup using all wooden spouts, hand drills, and wood fires, with no modern conveniences, just for fun!
We also purchased an iron spout driver to use to gently tap the spouts into the tap hole. I can’t imagine not using this tool, even though I've read that it is not necessary. I would be afraid of messing up the spout if I just tried to hammer it in without the driver. This item was expensive at Lehman’s, but averaged out if we had to spend extra shipping to just buy it alone from another source. We bought it from Lehman’s for $12.95 but I saw the same thing for $6.95 other places.
It is nicer to have a small hammer to tap the spouts into the hole you drill instead of using a rock. I used this one that had belonged to my dad:
These spouts go with a 7/16” drill bit that I did not own. I bought an inexpensive one (Hitachi) at Lowe’s for about $7.00 that worked wonderfully. I also bought an expensive one for $14.00 (Stanley) just to compare and have an extra. I could not tell that the expensive one worked any better. Maybe it will last for many more years? If we only drill 10 or 20 holes with it a year, I would imagine that both bits will last for decades or longer!
We drilled the holes into the trees only about 2 1/2” deep, but we did not measure. We just stuck the drill in and pulled it out and noted how far the wood was sticking on the bit. If it looked like it was less than 2” we stuck it back in a little farther.
Here are the drills we used with the drill bits:
The hand drill belonged to my grandfather and still works well. I am thankful to have it. It, however, was amazingly harder to use than the portable power drill. It really took a good effort to drill a hole. We drilled one hole with the old-fashioned hand drill, just to know that we can do it, but then we drilled all the others with the power drill. The power drill only took about 2 seconds to drill each hole. Very little force was needed and it was extremely easy to use with the trees. (We are really spoiled today in the 21st century, aren’t we?)
You can collect the sap in anything, really. I know the old timers used metal pails and before that, wooden ones. I looked at buying some used metal pails online, but they were so expensive and most that I found looked like they would have rust spots in them. I did not want to use something that would compromise the syrup, even if it were old-fashioned.
I decided to buy nice, new, plastic buckets at Lowe’s. They sell clear 3.5-gallon buckets that can have a lid snap on them for under $4.00 each. If you want a lid you have to buy them separate. (The same lids are cheaper at Wal-Mart than Lowe’s for $1.24 each I think.) I guess I put about $50.00 into buying the 10 buckets and lids we used, but I did not buy them all at one time.
So that’s all the equipment you need to tap your sugar maples: a drill with a 7/16” bit, a spout for each hole you drill, a small hammer and a spout driver to tap the spout firmly into the hole, and buckets of some kind to collect the sap.
We tapped the trees when the flow was on and sap began gushing out of each hole before we could even get the spouts in! It was sunny and warming up quickly at 9:30 Saturday morning. The night before was another freezing night about 20 degrees. These are the perfect conditions for tapping. I know they tap their trees in March or April up north, but I figured that here in Kentucky, we only have about a month until we start having everyday spring weather, so now was a good time. I do think that there will be some other good days in February that the trees could still be tapped here at our location. We just need to have the good freezes at night followed by sunny, warm daytime temperatures.
This may be a good place to note that the sap flow stopped sometime overnight Sunday. Friday night was 20 degrees, Saturday got up in the mid 40s, Saturday night was back in the 20s with a heavy frost, and Sunday got up into the 60s! We collected about 35-40 gallons of sap during Saturday and Sunday from the 10 taps and then Sunday night it stayed in the upper 40s. Monday we had a nice day in the mid 60s again. When Matthew went up in the afternoon to check on the buckets, there was almost no more sap in them than what he had left Sunday (when his transporting buckets were full), and the sap did not flow any more today.
We had read that the sap was supposed to stop when the temperatures stay warm for a prolonged time or when they stay cold for a prolonged time, and I guess that highs in the 60s and lows in the 40s was too warm. I think the sap will flow again the next time we have a night in the 20s followed by the day in the 40s. (We may not collect anymore sap, though. Even though it was only for a couple of days, the family is getting tired of the intense schedule. We will see how everyone in the family feels at that time, but it has been some long work to get the syrup out of the sap.)
We had our first few gallons of sap before noon on Saturday. I had read that it takes 40 or 50 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. Using the 40:1 ratio we figured that it would take 2.5 gallons of sap to fill a half-pint mason jar (8 ounces). After we boiled that down and it only made about 6 ounces, we increased up to the 50:1 ratio. This meant that we would need 3 gallons of sap to make 1 half-pint, and this is what we have used for the rest of the batches. Sometimes it has made a bit more than 8 ounces, but it seems to be pretty close.
I also had purchased a $4.95 candy thermometer to use in this experiment because I kept reading that the syrup should boil at 7 degrees hotter than the first sap. You should be able to note the exact temperature that water, or the first sap, boils at and then keep adding more sap as the water is steamed away. Theoretically, when the boiling temperature got 7 degrees hotter, we would know that we now have maple syrup.
This did not work for us, I guess because the thermometer was not marked off in that precise of increments. I could not really tell what the exact temperature was. I was a bit surprised that water boils here in our location somewhere between 200 degrees and 205 degrees. For some reason I thought that 212 degrees was an official constant boiling temperature of water no matter where you are. (So much for public education, even though I went to a good school. Or maybe that shows that I do not do much cooking?)
Anyway, we decided to use the ratio approach and boil down the sap in “batches”. We filled up our 21-quart stockpots with 3 gallons of sap, filtered through a couple layers of cheesecloth, and started them boiling. We found that our hottest heat source is the electric range in the kitchen. Our propane grill and Coleman camp stove had served the purpose, but took a long time. The day got dark on us up at our “sugar camp” and we still had plenty of sap to boil.
We stayed up there for quite a while Saturday night, boiling down the sap. Matthew made a nice campfire and we had supper under the bright stars. The clear winter sky was breathtaking.
It is still winter, however, and as I wrote earlier, it was dipping back into the 20s on this evening. Even with the fire and the stoves, we decided to move the operation to our nice warm kitchen. (I did have a dream after I went to bed that I was still up at the sugar camp sleeping on a bed of leaves. I was calling down to the house on our 2-way radios that I was going to sleep up there while waiting for the next batch of syrup to be made. Funny how my subconscious brain works at times during sleep!)
I had read in many places not to boil the sap in doors. At least one source said that all the steam would coat everything in the house with a sticky residue. After letting many gallons of sap boil on our kitchen range, I would now say the sticky residue part is a myth. After thinking about it, it doesn’t make sense that the steam would be sticky since the only thing that is boiling away in the steam is the water content. The tree sap is 98% water and only 2% sugar. About 2/3 of the water needs to be taken out. The remaining solution would be 66-67% sugar and would now be syrup. The only thing that is evaporated into the air is all that water. (Lisa later disagreed with this point. She says that we did mess up the kitchen with stickiness. I guess I didn't notice since I wasn't the one who cleaned it up!)
The only problem we had boiling all that water in-doors was the humidity. Most of the cabinets in the kitchen had moisture droplets form on them, and sometimes it was quite heavy. In some ways the humidity was not completely a problem here, however. We heat the house with propane so we usually have air that is too dry. The added moisture to the air did us some good, I think. We did have a fan on and cracked open a window and the kitchen door from time to time to ventilate out the steam.
Some day, I would like to have plenty of wood cut up to use in our wood stove that we could use outside, or even build something that would resemble the old-time sugar camps. It does make sense why folks who operate large operations build a regular “sugar house” or “sugar shack” to do all this boiling in and to also be warm while doing it in the winter. We have the space to build such a structure, and the shack could double as a hunting cabin. Hmmm…..
So we have three gallons of maple tree sap in one large stockpot. It takes about an hour to bring this quantity to just a simmering boil. I stir the pot every now and then so I feel like I am doing something. Another 2 or 3 hours pass before there is a real noticeable difference in the quantity, and I have felt good stirring the pot and watching the bubbles during this time. (If you stir it in real fast circles, you can make the middle boil straight up like a small fountain. Pretty cool!)
At this point it has evaporated enough to be moved into a 3 quart sauce pan, and we have to start watching it closer, stirring every now and then (partly to feel like I am doing something).
Here is a picture of one of the stockpots boiling:
and here it is in the smaller sauce pan:
The sap tastes like very lightly sweetened water right out of the tree and we enjoyed tasting the solution as it changed after every couple of hours of heating. As time progresses the drink gets sweeter and sweeter. We have thought that it might be nice to stop at a point far before syrup and just enjoy the sap as a very good and sweet drink by itself! I wonder what it would taste like on ice?
After about another hour it has really gotten to be a small amount, maybe 4 or 5 cups, and I like moving the contents to a smaller pot. Now I think stirring is very important to make sure the sugar content doesn’t settle on the bottom and get scorched. We did not have any to scorch, but I can imagine it happening easily. When the pot only has a couple of cups of sap/syrup it starts foaming up vigorously. I figured out that this is when it is almost finished.
We accidentally turned a couple or three batches into maple sugar because we evidently boiled it just a bit too long. We do want to have some maple sugar, so we will come back to those jars and work them some more.
After it has foamed a bit, the contents have boiled down to about 8 ounces and just the right size to pour into a half-pint jar. We used the cheesecloth again to filter any of the “sugar sand” as we pour the very hot syrup into the jar. When we put the flat and the ring on we set the jar upside down to let the syrup help seal the jar, along with the heat. Somewhere I read that maple syrup will keep almost indefinitely if the seal is not broken.
We tried to have 3 “batches” going at all times. As we moved one batch to a smaller pot, we would fill up the large stockpot with another 3 gallons. Originally, I wanted to have 4 and 5 batches going at one time. We could fit two large 21-quart pots on the grill and our grill has another burner on the side, and the camp stove has two burners. What I discovered, however, is when you have all the burners going, none of them are as hot as if only one were burning, and I could barely get anything to boil.
One thing that I was unsure of, was when the sap would flow. Somehow I had gotten it in my mind that the sap could fill up the buckets in the middle of the night. Maybe it can if it does not get below freezing, but our experience this time was that the sap cut off after it got below freezing, and then started flowing again the next morning with the warm temperatures. This was a relief, as I was picturing having to get up in the middle of the freezing night and empty the sap buckets.
Something else I was not sure about, was leaving the half-boiled pots of sap overnight. After it was so late Saturday, we decided to just turn off the range and start it back up Sunday when we were able to pay attention to it. We have read that sap can spoil like milk, but I don’t think ours was affected by leaving it overnight. We tried to keep the other sap that was waiting to be boiled stored outside each night where it was still cool.
To be honest, most of our sap was boiled down on our electric range. Saturday was the only day we made a real “sugar camp” out in the woods. The boiling on Sunday was at the house with the electric range and an electric hot plate that has two burners. Lisa and the children also had them going most of the day yesterday while I was at work and they were doing school and today they are finishing the last batch of sap that we collected.
As you can imagine, we are not necessarily looking for more sap flow days right now, but give it a few more days, and maybe we will be up for it.
I should note the only true negative aspect to this experiment. Obviously, the energy it takes to make a relatively small amount of maple syrup is a factor. I am wondering if we will notice a spike in our electric bill from running the range so much. It is hard, if not impossible, to figure how much this maple syrup has actually cost us to produce. I do think that we could come up with enough wood for a fire and we could do the same thing outside and make maple syrup for free. This would make it much more labor intensive. The saw mills around here gives their slabs away for free and many folks say it is the best wood for heating, so that is an option for stocking up the wood supply.
Another negative might be the time required, but if you think about it, it really takes a lot of time invested for anything worthwhile.
I haven’t showed you any of the finished products yet. Here are some pictures of the jars. We still need to boil down the sap for one or two more jars, and at least one jar’s worth has been eaten in the form of sugar. We will have 12 or 13 half pint jars from the 40 or so gallons of sap, and I think that is pretty good!
This picture may be too dark to see the light amber color:
Here is a good picture comparing one that we boiled too long with one that seems to be perfect.
It has sugar crystallized in it. I think we can heat it back up, stir it quite a bit and pour it into sugar cakes. We do want to have regular sugar but we still have to work on that. I think we could crush the contents of the solid jar and pound it into powdered sugar if we want.
Here is a close up of one of the jars (a bit blurry). I wonder what grade it would be?
All in all I am well pleased. Not only have the children learned some great science lessons of the natural world God has created, but we have also discovered another valuable resource that God put here at Pure Water Hollow. It is good to know that natural sugar is available on our own property if it is needed or wanted.
We also know that it can be done very successfully. I think the future will see us perfect the art and I’m sure we will come up with more efficient methods of accomplishing the goal of making maple syrup.
This first attempt has been a sweet success!
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6 comments
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haflinger on February 5, 2008 at 10:12 am
I must say you did a great job in details..I might of missed it but , did you say anything about the different grades? and the ratio 40 to one? Like I said I might of missed it..
Here in Maine they haven't started yet..And many leave there sap lines up year round…
Thanks for sharing..
Blessings haflinger/Sister Brenda
Purewater's reply:
It seemed that ours was more on a 50:1 ratio. We started with 40:1 but had to increase it. Maybe the trees here in the south have a slightly lower sugar content? As far as Grading, we have no idea. So far we have graded it as liquid or solid. Either way it is very sweet. This was our first attempt at sugaring. We are not planning on selling anything, just using it for ourselves.
Edited by Purewater on Tuesday, February 5, 2008 at 10:44 AM
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Karen on February 5, 2008 at 11:07 am
Very well done. I've always been curious about this topic. Wow, a stack of pancakes with some of that dark syrup would be good right now.
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LittleHouse on February 5, 2008 at 12:47 pm
It looks like you all had a lot of fun! It's nice to families doing fun things together:)
I hope you enjoy a big stack of pancakes!!!
Ma
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Belle on February 5, 2008 at 2:27 pm
This has been educational and interesting. Thank you very much for sharing.
You have done much more than create maple syrup, you have created a memory that will live on for genterations. Your children most likely will talk of this time to their children and grandchildren and on and on.
We are going to order our spouts today. I looked a the ones Lehmans had just last week. It was exciting to see your post about this since we have been talking about doing it too.I hate the freezing nights, but now I want them back so that we can give syrup making a try.
maa's mom
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sheryl on February 5, 2008 at 3:10 pm
thanks for sharing this with us. I enjoyed reading it. I will be down Saturday for pancakes. LOL Just kidding. I would love to be able to do something like this. We have several maple trees here on the farm. What color does the sugar maple tree leaves turn in the fall? sheryl
Purewater's reply:
The leaves are orange/red in the fall, but ours have not been overly vibrant theses past few years. More of dull orange.
Edited by Purewater on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 9:32 AM
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Mom on February 6, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I ordered our spouts and a spout driver from Lehmans, yesterday. Thanks to you I ordered the spout driver. I did not see it in the cataloug with the spouts, so I knew nothing about a spout driver. We are getting colder weather again so maybe we will get to do some sap collecting too. My husband is going to put all the spouts in for us, but he does not know one tree from another. I will go along to point them out to him. We got our buckets two weeks ago at the Dollar Tree for a dollar each. They are 12 qt buckets with a handel. If you need more buckets and you have a Dollar Tree near you, you might want to check them out.
I am so ready to give it a try. Thanks for all the valuable information that you have shared here.
I will let you know how we do.
maa's mom
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