It’s maple sugar season ©voyager, all rights reserved
Bubba and I thought we’d check out our wee forest today and we were pleased to see that maple syrup season is in full swing. There’s a farm adjacent to our woods that’s full of sugar maples and they process the syrup the old-fashioned way, with pails to collect the sap and an old-fashioned sugar shack where they boil it down over a wood fire. The ratio is 14 litres of sap gives you 1 litre of syrup. Jack has spent a lot of time checking out the farm and those maple trees and I’d warrant a guess that he’s peed on many, maybe even most, of the trees that are tapped. That’s why we call this farm’s maple syrup “Jack Juice.”
Tap, tap, tap ©voyager, all rights reserved
Mmm…©voyager, all rights reserved
Beautiful last shot, lovely colours and shading!
We made our own maple syrup until my mum got tired of it, because dad kept promising a technical upgrade that never happened… So March I associate with lugging heavy buckets about, because of course my parents used the good oldfashioned manual collection method vicariously through me and my siblings.
Still, nothing tastes like homemade maple syrup, I’ll tell you that!
Oh and far as I remember, it’s not 14 but 30 to 40 litres per litre syrup… (Possibly for sugar maple itself it is less, we used all kinds of maple trees from the forest.)
Maple trees are yummy with pancakes; I heat their blood and pour it all over!
Yummy with pancakes, yummy with toast, yummy in fudge, just yummy.
And I agree with rq, that last shot is gorgeous.
Allegedly our local norvegian maple can also be used this way, only with slightly bigger juice to syrup ratio. I would like to try that, but there is no tree on my property where I could. A few years ago I felled a sycamore maple near my house a few years ago, because it was dangerously leaning towards it. It sprouted sweet juice from the stump in the spring in no small amounts. I collected a bit then and tested it for sugar content and yes, it was sweet.
Global warming is going to put a huge crimp on maple syrup production no matter the species though.
How do you keep bugs, debris, etc. out of the collecting buckets?
We did it the oldfashioned way, fine cloth filter when pouring into the collective boiling pot. I’m pretty sure there’s professional methods out there, though, like complicated lids and the like.
I love how the (pre?)roots seem to coil around as they go up from the ground to form the trunk.
As far as I’m concerned, pancakes are just an excuse to eat maple syrup.