Germain Gang

The Sweetest Sign of Spring...

{ 11:56, Friday, April 18, 2008 } { 0 comments } { Link }

My favourite sign of spring has to be when the sap starts flowing in the maple trees.

Thirty five years ago my grandparents bought 100 acres of bush, because they really enjoyed nature and wildlife. It's very rocky there (not good farmland) and has a swamp on it, but it does have an area where maple trees grow. When we were kids my grandparents would tap trees and boil down the sap to make enough syrup for the family. When they grew too old to do it anymore, we just kind of gave it up.

Last year David and I decided to give it a try again. We tapped 15 trees. It turned out that three of them were actually oak trees.

It's very hard to tell the difference when there's no leaves on them. So we collected sap from twelve trees. It was a lot of work and took a lot of time but we wound up with six litres of syrup. Yum.

This year we were better organized. We went last fall and marked maple trees with yarn so we would know what to tap. By the beginning of March we were eager to get started. Then it snowed. And snowed. And snowed.

In mid-March we finally got there, but the snow was three feet deep in places. But we did get started.

David drilled the holes, then hammered in the taps and hung the pails. Matt and Julie helped.

We checked the pails often. The weather has to co-operate, we need the temperature to get below freezing at night, then well above freezing during the day. The better the conditions, the more sap will flow.

Yippee! It's full! We collected close to 30 pails @3.5 US gallons each. That's almost 400 litres. We aren't sure of the exact amount, because we boiled some while we were still collecting. That sounds like a lot, but it takes about 40 litres of sap to make just one litre of syrup, so we should wind up with about 10 litres.

So now for the boiling. We use an outdoor fireplace with the sap in roasting pans. My grandparents used to have a huge steel pan that would totally cover this fireplace, but it has been lost over the years. We'd like to get another one for next year, but for now we are making do.

We also got our hands on an old wood stove, so we got a large pot going on that too.

So we boiled, and boiled, and boiled...we spent many hours sitting by the fire, adding wood or sap as needed. We talked a lot, read our bibles a lot, and just spent good quality time with each other. It is a lot of work, but this part of the process is fun and relaxing too.

We've been doing the boiling on the weekends. Most of the sap is still in the freezer, and we take it out gradually as we need it. But we have managed to make just over three litres of syrup. We have a long way to go!

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