Last week we FINALLY got around to tapping our maple trees. Just in time too – we had also opened our last container of syrup. The snow had started melting away, the chickens were out scratching in the leaves around the base of the trees. We tapped the 6 trees in front of our barn, with old-fashioned metal buckets and lids. And as soon as we drilled the holes and attached the buckets, I recognized the familiar “drip, drip, drip”
We talked about switching to plastic tubing, which would gravity feed to a large collection bin. But weren’t sure how we would boil all that sap. Over the week, we collected about 15 gallons of sap… and weren’t sure how we were going to boil it until Thursday.
Cinder blocks. We built a little firebox out of 20 cinderblocks that we could put a pan on top of. And a friend was kind enough to let us borrow his pan. It turns out cinder blocks are heavy, so we had to make two trips to the depot to transport all of them to our house.
And so, we spent our day Sunday drinking coffee and boiling sap. It was a much better set up than last year. The fire box was more accessible than our fire pit, and the pan had a much larger surface area than last year’s lobster pot. It took about 4 hours to boil our 15+ gallons down to 1, at which point we transferred it to a 5 quart pot to finish inside.
You know the sap is syrup when it boils 7 degrees over the boiling point of water. In our town today, that happens to be 217 degrees. About 40 gallons of sap makes 1 gallon of syrup, so we were expecting to get just about half a gallon. Delicious!!
