We finished our first batch of maple syrup — about 3.25 gallons completed boiling last night and have been bottled and sealed today.
Category: Maple Sugaring
2024 Maple Season: Still Collecting Sap
This is the final sap collection for our first run of maple syrup — and a bunch of little fish in the river.
2024 Maple Season: Flame On
We’re boiling sap — and Scott learned that the Ohio DMV system calculates expiry dates by “today but change the year”. So … you cannot register a car on Feb 29th since there is no Feb 29th next year. Maybe you could do a four-year registration?
2024 Maple Season: Sappier
Still collecting sap — the enormous tree by the river was disappointing. No sap from two taps! The big black walnut trees are producing well, but the smaller trees didn’t do anything.
2024 Maple Season: Sap Collection
We started collecting our maple sap — somewhere around 80 gallons of sap which will make 2 gallons of syrup. This is the first year we had kitten helpers – they were rather puzzled by the ratchet straps and buckets on the trees, but they enjoyed that we were playing in the woods with them. Even if they couldn’t figure out what our game was.
2024 Maple Season: Tree Tapping
We’ve got 43 maple trees and two black walnut trees tapped. 18 maples were tapped yesterday in the back woods (plus the one right by the driveway).
The big maple by the river, that I’ve been waiting to tap since we found it … had nothing! Hopefully sap starts flowing there too. The other trees, though, were drip, drip, dripping steadily
2023 Maple Season – Wrap up
A total of about 6 gallons of syrup this year — 3.5 gallons on the 6th of March and another 2.5 gallons on the 5th of April. We tapped 39 trees (some with two taps — we need to log the type of tree & how many taps get put in!) including some on the new farm land.
River Walk
We took an hour to check all the maple buckets before the sap run starts again — and paused to walk in the river, find cool rocks, and try skipping rocks.
Maple log — finishing boil
We used our DigiBoil 65L 240V pot to finish the sap since it’s quick to remove from the heat once the syrup is ready (and it’s got a spigot that makes emptying the pot easier). This also gave us a good picture of how long the DigiBoil is going to take to boil wort when we’re making beer. Yesterday, with temps in the upper 30’s, it took about 1h50m (basically two hours) to boil 10 gallons of concentrated sap. Today, with temps in the upper 40’s, it took about 50 minutes to boil 7 gallons of concentrated sap.
Sunday 05 March 2023
15:44 59F
16:40 167F
17:17 203F
17:34 208F and rapidly boiling
1h50m to boil.
Flamed out just after midnight
Monday 06 March 2023
09:43AM – 68F turned on 500W
09:50AM – Turned on 2nd switch
09:56AM – 111F – turned on 3rd switch
10:32AM – 7 gallons is now boiling
About 50 minutes to boil.
Maple flame out at 2:34PM
Bottled, we have 3.5 gallons of maple syrup from our first run
Mid-Season Maple Collection Status
So far, we’ve collected about 121 gallons of maple sap. We started boiling the sap on the 23rd using our new maple evaporator.
Maple Sap Collection Log
| Date | Location | Quantity |
| 2/14/2023 | All trees except river | 60 |
| 2/18/2023 | All trees except river | 20 |
| 2/23/2023 | All trees except river | 15 |
| 2/25/2023 | River | 6 |
| 2/26/2023 | Back woods and front yard | 12 |
| 2/26/2023 | Top of Driveway – east and west | 8 |