Maple Grove

Every night I read to the kids as they lay tucked into their beds. Since the boys are older, we decided to read chapter books. We started with the Harry Potter series, then after the first two books we moved onto the Little House on the Prairie series. The boys liked Farmer Boy best because his chores were similar to their chores. Everyone perked up when it was time for farmer boy and his father to go to the Maple grove to collect the sap.

We don't have a Maple grove like farmer boy, in fact, we don't even have a Maple tree on our property. However, we have friends that do. In mid March, when temperatures rose into the 50's, but would drop below freezing at night was when the trees started pumping sap. We drilled holes into three trees and set up hoses so the sap would drip into buckets. We collected 25 gallons of sap this year.

We boiled the sap for about 24 hours. I like to use a turkey fryer to boil the sap outside. Keeping a fire going for that long to boil the sap doesn't appeal to me. After a couple of strainings with a coffee filter, we finished boiling it on the stove. We harvested a little over a half gallon of syrup. That half gallon will last us the year, hopefully.

This week I opened our last pint jar of syrup from 2017. We didn't get any from 2018 because I burned the sap when I was boiling it down. It was boiling down faster than I was adding more sap, and I ruined our boiling pot. In my defense, we did have a newborn at the time.

In Farmer Boy, they made their own sugar from the sap, maple sugar. It's the same process, they just kept boiling down the sap until they got the sugar granules without burning it. The boys got excited when farmer boy drank the sap just like they had. I feel pretty grateful that my kids can relate to farmer boy who lived in the 1860s. It doesn't make what we are doing seem so crazy.