The ideal weather for a good sap run only happens during a small window of time every spring {usually lasting a week}.  It needs to freeze at night, and then warm up to about 50 degrees during the day.  This is a tricky weather combination, but the best syrup is made during this window- a beautiful amber color and buttery taste.  Earlier in the spring, the syrup turns out very light in color, and less flavorful.  Later in the spring, the syrup is darker and thicker.  You know the season is over once you start seeing bugs floating in the sap when you go to collect it.

As I explained here, we don’t tap as many trees as we used to, because we do all the collection on foot now.  Instead of using horses to pull a sleigh with a tank on it, we now set up “collection stations” throughout the woods {large Tupperware bins}, and we dump the sap into these bins. 

The sap gets funnelled through hoses down to an underground holding tank.  It’s kept cold in there until we have enough to boil.  Since sap only has about 2% sugar content, it can take about 40-50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.  Our evaporator is very large, so we need at least 300 gallons of sap before we start boiling, or else we run the risk of burning the syrup in the pan.

A quick synopsis of how maple syrup is made can be found here, along with some neat old photos.

Our “maple mascots”, Charlie Brown and Schroeder, keep a look-out for us while we work.

The woods are quiet
except for the birds singing
and the ping-pinging.”
-Maple haiku, by Tonia

A very long time ago, when the world was new, Gitchee Manitou made things so that life was very easy for the people. There was plenty of game and the weather was always good and the maple trees were filled with thick sweet syrup. Whenever anyone wanted to get maple syrup from the trees, all they had to do was break off a twig and collect it as it dripped out.

One day, Manabozho went walking around. “I think I’ll go see how my friends the Anishinabe are doing,” he said. So, he went to a village of Indian people. But, there was no one around. So, Manbozho looked for the people. They were not fishing in the streams or the lake. They were not working in the fields hoeing their crops. They were not gathering berries. Finally, he found them. They were in the grove of maple trees near the village. They were just lying on their backs with their mouths open, letting maple syrup drip into their mouths.

“This will NOT do!” Manabozho said. “My people are all going to be fat and lazy if they keep on living this way.”

So, Manabozho went down to the river. He took with him a big basket he had made of birch bark. With this basket, he brought back many buckets of water. He went to the top of the maple trees and poured water in, so that it thinned out the syrup. Now, thick maple syrup no longer dripped out of the broken twigs. Now what came out was thin and watery and just barely sweet to the taste.

“This is how it will be from now on,” Manabozho said. “No longer will syrup drip from the maple trees. Now there will only be this watery sap. When people want to make maple syrup they will have to gather many buckets full of the sap in a birch bark basket like mine. They will have to gather wood and make fires so they can heat stones to drop into the baskets. They will have to boil the water with the heated stones for a long time to make even a little maple syrup. Then my people will no longer grow fat and lazy. Then they will appreciate this maple syrup Gitchee Manitou made available to them. Not only that, this sap will drip only from the trees at a certain time of the year. Then it will not keep people from hunting and fishing and gathering and hoeing in the fields. This is how it is going to be,” Manabozho said.

And, that is how it is to this day.

{Ojibwe Legend}

Sweet, buttery, sticky, wonderful maple syrup has been made in my family for 23 years now.  We do it the Manabozho way:

Drill a hole in a tree,
Put a “tap” in the hole,
Hang a pail from it,
Collect the sap when the pail is full,
Boil the sap in an “evaporator” {a huge pan over a huge fire} until it becomes syrup,
Can the syrup in mason jars,
Eat.

Back in the day, we used to tap 1,100 trees on our land, pouring what we collected into a big tank on a sleigh, pulled by a draft horse.  It was a lot of work, but we never thought of it that way.

There are too many wonderful things about syrup-making for it to really be considered “work”.  The smell of the air as the woods wake up for spring.  The sound of the sap as it drips from the tree.  The satisfying soreness of your arms after a long day of hauling heavy buckets.  The story-telling, snowball fights, pranks, and laughter.  The maple-steam billowing from the evaporator.  And of course, the first taste of syrup: hot, sticky, and worth it.

Even though we have scaled the operation back in recent years {we no longer have our horses, so we do all the collection on foot now}, syruping is still a beloved family tradition that brings us together, no matter what, every spring.

Some of our trees are large enough to hang two or three pails on.

When all the pails are hung, the woods fill with the soft sound of the sap dripping into the pails…ping, ping, ping…

Don’t let any snow get in the pails…

Make sure you save enough energy to have a little fun…

If you have a few maple trees on your property, I would really encourage you to try making some syrup!  Please feel free to contact me directly for more information about the process.  I would be happy to help you get started.  toniasimeone {at} gmail {dot} com

Stay tuned for the rest of the Making Maple Syrup series, coming soon!