maple syrup
Nothing Quite Like It
We are determined to do this maple syrup thing the homesteader way and it ain't easy. First of all, we are adverse to plastics and wanted no plastics to bespoil our pristine syrup. This is not as easy as you would think and the end result is usually an additional cost for the purchase of some acceptable alternative. So, even though plastic gallon jugs might have sufficed to collect the sap from the trees, we sprung for the metal sap pails and lids. I'm actually glad we did because attaching the pails was a pleasure and using them gives one a feeling of some permanence; that you are doing something of substance that you just don't get handling plastic. This is a very subtle distinction I know but it is real.
Sap
The sap is flowing. Temperatures here hit 50 degrees today and that started the sap running in earnest for the first time. We have purchased enough equipment to tap ten trees including spiles, tin buckets and lids and a drill bit the right size for the spiles. We picked up lots of good advice and tips from the guys at the sugar shack supply shop.
Sugar Shack II
We've really got Spring on our minds these days so we're right into planning for our maple sugaring venture. This is such a nice self-sufficiency project in so many ways. It will get us out in the bush early in the Spring. The cost is minimal if we can find ways to do it without buying a lot of fancy equipment. The only equipment we plan to buy are the spiles.
Sugar Shack
We're thinking about turning our hunt camp home into a 'sugar shack', at least for as long as it takes to make some maple syrup. I've tried this on a very small scale but we would like to produce enough quantity to last us the year. I'm guessing we could use about five gallons of the stuff if we had it. If sap averages approximately 2 percent sugar, 43 gallons of sap would be required to produce 1 gallon of syrup. So, we will need 215 gallons of sap. If we take a wild guess and say that each tap will produce 10 gallons of sap, we will have to tap 22 trees. That sounds possible in terms of the time it takes to tap each tree and collect the sap each day.
