Early March…. the sun is brighter and Spring is on the way. Each year I look forward to when the sap starts to flow in our maple trees. It’s time to make maple syrup and what better way to make the last weeks of winter fly past? Maple time is the herald of spring for me.
We still tap the trees the old fashion way — with a spile and a covered, metal bucket hanging from it. We got our buckets from Bud Dame in Ashland, NH so many years ago. When Dave was a teenager, he helped Bud collect the sap from the pails hung throughout the woods. The good old days, when he had to walk through knee-deep snow carrying buckets of sloshing sap.
Once the taps are in our tree and the buckets are hung….soon I hear the drips of sweet sap filling up the bucket. Eventually there’s enough to dump into my storage container. Soon that watery sap will be boiled down to maple syrup. 40 gallons of sap will make about 1 gallon of syrup.
Because I love the sweet aroma of maple, I boil the sap down on my kitchen stove. The house is filled with the wonderful aroma. And soon enough there is some maple syrup and maple sugar. The very first year I did this, I made the mistake of not watching the boiling pot. Our daughters were little and needed my attention. “Oh …what an awful sticky mess that boiled over syrup made!!!!” Ever since that incident, I’ve been extra careful to pay attention to my syrup.
Maybe someday I’ll live on a farm and we’ll have a small sugar shack with a real evaporator. Then I can make enough syrup to share.
I love this time of year. Each day, as I take the kids outside to go to school, we say, “I wonder if it is a warm day? Will the sap be dripping into the buckets?” So far, one of our trees is going crazy! The other two – a different maple variety than the first – are going slowly or not at all. Isaac suggests that we tap a different tree.
By: Heather, David & Isaac on March 4, 2010
at 9:51 am