Friday, March 20, 2009

Spring Sights, Sounds & Tastes!

Happy Spring!
I welcomed Spring this week by taking in all the sights, sounds and tastes it had to offer.
My dad and I tapped a sugar maple for the first time. For those of you who may be wondering what the heck I'm talking about......Tree tapping is the process of extracting sap from a sugar maple to later be processed into Maple Syrup!

You start off by selecting a good size sugar maple tree that you may have in your back yard as we did. You then gently drill a hole into the tree and insert a spile or spout(homemade or commercial) we used a sanitized pvc pipe. Immediately after we drilled the hole.......the sap came dripping out of the tree! A very good sign the time is right for tappin! Next we made a small hole in the top of a sanitized plastic water jug and placed the pipe in the hole and secured the jug to the tree. As you can see in the last photo.....the sap is clear just like water. Well actually.....it is 98% water. The other 2% is sugar.

Tree tappin can only be done from Janurary until April. You must have freezing nights followed by sunny 40-50 degree days for the sap to come up. If you would like to try this for yourself you might want to read this article from Mother Earth News: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/1981-01-01/Its-Tree-Tappin-Time-Most-Everywhere.aspx

I bet your wondering where's the syrup???? Well, we are still waiting on that. We are trying to collect enough sap to make a good little batch of syrup. It takes 40 gal. of sap to make 1 gal. of maple syrup! Our goal is to get maybe a half a pint....lol. Anyway, I'll be sure to let you know how it turns out! To be continued..........