Maple Tapping

Here you see a group of trees tapped and buckets hanging from each tapping.  Small trees that a man can put his arms around take 1 tap.  The bigger the tree gets the more taps they can use without hurting the tree.  They use up to 5 taps on the biggest trees.

Sap runs in the trees when temperatures are freezing at night and warm (40 degrees) in the daytime.  It is, of course, gravity flow.  If they have trees on a hill or slope, they use plastic tubing to catch the sap.  They have a holding tank at the bottom of the hill/slope and all the sap runs down the tree, into the plastic tubing and travels down to the holding tank.  They keep a close watch on the holding tank because if the saps runs quickly and gets ahead of them, it will overflow…..what a mess. 

If you look closely, you can see the plastic tubing running between the sugar maples.  Notice the holding tank almost center picture near the bottom of the hill.  I can’t remember how many gallons it holds, but it’s amazing how much sap they collect.  Each tap yields approximately 10 gallons of sap a year.  That 10 gallons of sap will boil down to about 1 quart of pure maple syrup.

Here is Mr Everson in the “sugar house”.  That’s what they call the place where they boil down the sap into pure maple syrup.  The boiling tank is 16 feet by 6 feet and is heated by a wood fire in the chamber below the tank.  They use wood from their own maple farm and heat the tank of sap to 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. 

They weren't “boiling” the day we went.  It was too cold to gather enough sap to boil.  But, they put a small fire in the chamber to show us how it works.  They have wood stacked and ready to burn.  They cut wood all year long except in July and August when the “deer flies and black flies own the forests” (Can’t wait for that time of year here). 

Here’s Elder Poulson and Elder Sing in the Maple Farm store.

In the store they turn some of their syrup into candy, maple covered peanuts, maple fluff (a cotton candy made from spun maple) and our favorite, maple crème.  The maple crème is like whipped butter/honey, but it is pure maple syrup processed to spread on pancakes, etc.