Sap Suckers

Tonight my husband licked a tree, which gives a whole new meaning to the term tree hugger. In his

Last years supplies

defense, he was tasting the sap that was dripping out of the tree. The boys got a taste too. It's sugar water, and we are in the middle of maple sap harvest.

Last year my husband decided we were going to give maple sap collecting a try. We just used what we had, which were random brass fittings and hose. We used a propane burner to cook the sap down. It took us a couple of days of outside cooking to get the sap to syrup. I realized you need a lot of sap to get syrup. It's approximately 40+ gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup. We did some serious collecting and cooking, but we ended up with a years supply. Now that we've tried it,

we are all sappy for syrup.

This year the weather surprised us and we weren't ready. Our fittings, hoses, and containers weren't even found in the garage. However, we upgraded to some spiles and some buckets this year. We drilled the holes in our maple trees, hammered the spile in, and attached the bucket underneath the spile. We dump the buckets every night.

The sap runs nicely in this weather, when the low temperature is in the 30s overnight and the high temperature is in the 60s and sunny

. Once the maple tree has buds on it, the sap collecting is over. We are a week late because some varieties of maples are already budded out. Luckily, the one in our yard isn't. Since we are a week late we started asking our friends if we could tap their maple trees. Everyone is glad to have their sap harvested.

Another thing we changed this year is how we process it. I didn't want to cook the sap down over a fire that you have to watch and monitor for a few days. Last year we used a lot of propane, and we still had to monitor it closely. So this year I have my 18 quart roaster on the porch that I pour all of the sap into and cook it down. It takes no time at all and I just run an extension cord.

If you've never tried real maple syrup, you are missing out. And just because we are going through a cold spell again doesn't mean the season is over. This is hunting and gathering at it's best while still urban farming, so go find those Maples.

Note: any variety of maple will give sap for syrup. It just might take more sap to produce syrup depending on the variety.