By Julie Miller, Rochester MNWWN Member
It all started back in February of 1993. Whitewater State Park was offering a class on cultivating maple syrup through Continuing Education. Our girls were young and this sounded like a great adventure. We had recently purchased some land suitable for fishing, hiking, camping and who knows? Perhaps even maple syruping!
It was a basic class without any high-tech components, making it a great how-to that anyone with a few maple trees could try their hand. We were even allowed to taste the syrup - gee, was that great!
We came home eager to tell Dad (my husband) all about it. I had taken notes and so described the basics of setting up a brick frame where a fire would be built and then we would need a wide pan that would act as an evaporator where the sap would condense. Of course, before any of this happened, we would have to tap some trees!
I don’t think we were able to get any equipment locally at that point. We found a mail order business that would supply us with taps. We used 5-gallon buckets to collect the sap. We started with seven taps that first year. The trees were all in close proximity to an area we were turning into a campsite. In those first few years we just let the sap drip into the buckets, but eventually we found that not only were the squirrels (and perhaps the deer) helping themselves to the sap, but the bugs were drowning in it. Soon we moved to rubber tubing going into a hole in the covers but that didn’t keep the squirrels and other rodents from eating through the rubber to get at the good stuff. By that time the mail order businesses were selling plastic bags with frames to collect the sap and that is what we have been using ever since.
Our filtering system has evolved through the years along with the materials now available. We started out using what is commonly called cheese to filter as the sap is boiled. Now there are felt, as well as fine paper filters, available to filter out sediment from the sap/syrup, which are used throughout the boiling and canning process. Even after all the filtering, it is a challenge to get completely clear syrup in the finished product.
The fall and winter, when the heat of the summer is past, are good times to collect wood for the sugar shack. God supplies the trees during wind storms, my husband uses chain saws and axes to cut the wood to size. It’s easiest during the winter when he can pile the wood onto a sled and pull the sled full of wood to the campsite.
Through the years we have gone from 7 taps, to 9 and now up to 32 taps; not an enormous amount, but what we can manage. The area where we collect the sap is a thick hardwood forest with the Kinney Creek running through it. There is no even ground, and during the late winter and early spring, anything from old fashioned woven snowshoes to the ice grippers and ski poles are needed to navigate the paths to the sugar shack. We hand carry the 5-gallon buckets of sap to the evaporator sights. Because we don’t live on sight, we sometimes need to collect and store the sap in clean 30 gallon buckets buried in snow until a day off to boil occurs. If conditions are good, a memorable winter camping exhibition occurs, enabling us to keep up with boiling the sap. This is the really fun part.
The more challenging time is getting the (mostly) syrup up the hill, which at some points is at a 45 degree angle! The sap has boiled down to about 7 gallons that we carry up in clean, stainless dairy buckets. During the late 90s and early 2000s, our Samoyed/lab helped pull a cart with the sap as well as other supplies up the hill.
Now my husband does most of this work, hand carrying the sap up the hill, making as many trips as necessary! I work at getting myself up the hill and usually have a backpack and perhaps one dairy bucket and a ski pole in hand.
The final step is when we bring the (almost) syrup home to process into jars. I have a few large pots in which to boil the sap/syrup for the final evaporation. We use a hydrometer to determine when the sap becomes syrup. This final step takes most of a day, depending on how much syrup I am working with. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. The most we have ever recorded processing in a given season is 9 gallons of syrup; thus, 360 gallons of sap during one season. That doesn’t consider the stories of spilled sap (not as bad) and spilled syrup (all that work!).
Other enjoyments? The smell of maple smoke on my husband’s clothes when he comes home after a long day of boiling! Sometimes the syrup has it’s own slight smokiness to it, coming from the open campfire and woodsmoke. A few spoons full of that syrup on our oatmeal in the morning is the best syrup of all!
Photo Credits: Julie and Dave Miller