Maple Syrup Season Part 1

Full buckets of sap mean more syrup for us!

This spring has been great for maple syrup producers. We tapped our trees on February 15th.  This is one of the earliest starts we've had since we started making syrup 8 years ago. The weather has been perfect for good sap flow, which means we have had plenty of sap to turn into syrup!

Good Sap Conditions
Sap flows best when the nighttime temperatures drop below freezing and the daytime temperatures are in the 40's. All of this good temperature variation means that the sap is flowing and we are collecting gallons of good sap for boiling! We can leave our taps in and continue to collect it until the trees start to bud. This will happen as soon as the weather stays consistently warm. It's impossible to know how long a sap season will last. Some years, it's only a few weeks. Other years the sap season lasts for over a month.

Preparation
Before we can tap the trees, we have to clean out each of the buckets and boil each of the spiles. In addition, we have to clean out the sap collection barrels. Cleaning the buckets is tedious and time consuming. Each one needs to be scrubbed, cleaned, and rinsed. None of us enjoy washing buckets but it has to be done. This year, we cleaned all of our buckets. There were 36 in total.

Tapping the Trees
Once the conditions are right and the equipment is cleaned, it's time to tap the trees. This is always a fun day and we often get lots of family volunteers to help. Matt drills the hole and hammers in the spile. The girls hang the buckets and I place the lids on each one. It's always gratifying to hear sap dripping into a freshly hung bucket.

This year's group of volunteers!

Collecting the Sap

Once the sap starts flowing we collect the sap every day or two, as needed. We empty the sap from each bucket into a 58 gallon food-grade barrel that is strapped into the back of our Polaris Ranger. Some years, there is too much snow to drive the Ranger from tree to tree. Those years, we have to empty each bucket, one at a time. Thankfully, the snow has melted enough that we can use the Ranger to help with the work load!

Any visitors who come to our house in the Spring are subject to help collect sap!

Once the collection barrel is full, it's time to boil sap and make some syrup! I'll detail that process in a future blog post!

Signs of Spring

Finally, it's time to tap the trees!

Spring felt like it came a bit early this year and there are no complaints here! We had a glorious stretch of warm weather in February and it got us all excited to be outside again. It's always encouraging after a long winter to start to see signs of spring approaching.

Chickens
It's a sure sign that spring is coming when our chickens finally start laying eggs again. We averaged 4 per day throughout the winter. This is pretty depressing when you consider that we have 23 laying hens. So, it's always exciting when the egg basket starts to fill up again. The girls get very excited every evening to give us the daily tally of eggs that have been collected. We are getting 12-15 every day now.

Our flock of chickens have started laying again!

Warm weather also means that the chicken coop has thawed out enough to finally clean it out. The girls are always happy when their home has fresh pine shavings!

A spring thaw allows for a coop clean-out.

Maple Syrup
Once the daily temperatures start to be above freezing, while the nighttime temperature stay below freezing, it's the perfect time to tap our Sugar Maple Trees. We have a modest number of Sugar Maple Trees on our property but it's enough to make it worth our while to tap them and make syrup. Tapping the trees is always a fun day for our family. The kids enjoy hanging the buckets and watching the spile for any drips of sap.

Caitlin and Addy hanging sap buckets.

Seeds
Mid-February means it's time to plant my pepper seeds. This year, I am using seeds that I saved from our vegetable garden last year. It's my first time using our own seeds and I'm hopeful that they will sprout.  We have one big, south-facing window in our home and I cram it full seed trays to get a head start on the garden.

Seed packets filled with seeds we saved from last year's pepper harvest.

Honey Bees
This spring we have decided to take on a new endeavor.  We are going to add bee hives to our ever-expanding list of hobbies.  I honestly don't know anything about what it takes to raise bees, so I've enrolled in "bee school" with our local bee club. Matt and I have been spending our spare time researching all we can in preparation for our two new hives. I'll be blogging more about this experience if you are interested in learning with me!