Category: Homesteading

Stages Of Maple Sap

I was surprised to find out people think maple sap is yellow. I never really thought about it, but I happened to see “maple water” for sale at a market. Clear liquid in a clear glass bottle. The ingredients were 100% maple sap … so I knew it was clear before I’d even thought to wonder. I’ve seen sap with a slightly yellow tint. We pull the taps as the tree leaves begin to bud, so it is possible the sap yellows more throughout the year. But maple sap is clear.

As it is boiled, the sap begins to caramelize. Caramelization is what gives maple syrup a golden brown color – darker syrup is formed from sap harvested later in the year. Lighter syrup is from sap harvested earlier in the year.

As the sap boils down, the color will get darker and the flavor will get sweeter and, well, maple-ier.

Maple Sugar Season Update

Strange day. The high here was 68 degrees, and we spent an hour playing in the sand at a beach. Not your normal February activity in these parts.

We got a LOT of sap today – and we only managed to collect the front half of the property. Thirteen trees with fifteen taps yielded thirty eight gallons of sap. Tomorrow, we’ll check the sycamore (hasn’t produced much sap to date, but here’s hoping), two hickories (same story), and ten more maple trees. Lots of boiling ahead, and it looks like it might freeze Sunday night to extend the sap run during the first part of next week.

Maple Sugar Season Update

We are about done boiling off sap from the first run — good timing, too, since it looks like we’re going to have a week or so of really warm weather (should be a good sap flow) followed by a freeze at the end of the month – extending the sugaring season into March.

We pulled the hallow ice cap from most of our buckets, so the sap started slightly concentrated. We’ve condensed about 39 gallons of sap to 2.5 gallons of not-quite-syrup. It will sit in the pan overnight to cool; tomorrow, we’ll filter it and transfer it into a pot. We will finish the syrup indoors.

Maple Season Underway

We’ve finished tapping our maple trees today. We got more than half done this past weekend (fifteen trees, eighteen taps), so managed to hit the awesome tap flow at the beginning of this week.

 

This year we are going to try tapping one sycamore tree (supposedly a butterscotch flavored syrup) and a hickory tree (no idea what that will taste like). We have twenty four maple trees tapped – a few of our biggest trees have two taps.

Last year was the first year that we tapped maple trees. We hadn’t identified the trees ahead of time, so we didn’t know if we had sugar maples, red maples, not.a.maple trees. We got about forty gallons of sap and used it to brew a dark maple beer.

Early autumn 2016, we took a couple cans of spray-paint, hiked the property looking for trees, and marked the trees with a small spot of paint at the base on the West side of the tree. White paint indicates a sugar maple, red paint indicates a red maple. The hickory trees are shag barks, so fairly easy to identify without leaves. The sycamore is in a unique location along the lake side of our property.

I don’t know if the “tree saver” 5/16″ taps are actually better for the trees, but that’s what we decided to use. As a non-commercial venture, potential reduction in production quantity isn’t detrimental … and I cannot see how they would be worse for the trees than the larger 7/16″ taps.

All of the equipment is stashed in a dump cart. When the ground was frozen, we took our Raven out into the woods. Now that the ground is thawed, we pull the cart by hand. We bought food grade five gallon buckets and lids from Lowes. There are a lot of types of spiles – I wanted stainless steel that we could re-use each year, and I wanted to use tubes instead of buying super expensive hang-on-the-tree buckets. There were still two different types – a straight tap and one that makes a 90 degree angle. It is a lot easier to put the tube on the 90 degree angle ones before inserting into the tree, and they look like they are going to be easier to remove.

We have two different types of tubing: the flexible blue 5/16″ tube meant for maple sap collecting and clear 5/16″ tube that is meant to be a siphon line when brewing beer. At 24$ for 100 foot of tubing, the beer siphon line was a great deal. We’ve got about 100 foot of tubing used for all of our taps.

In addition to these items, we use a battery powered drill with a 5/16″ bit, a small hammer for tapping spiles into trees, a rubber mallet for getting the lids onto the buckets, a little plastic tape measure to check tree size, and a little tool for pulling the lids off of buckets – I could NEVER get lids off plastic buckets, and this tool has turned it into a couple of second task.

With our cart full of tapping gear, we head out into the woods. Grab one bucket and lid, some tube, a spile, and the hammers. You are supposed to drill about three feet up on the tree, but stay at least six inches away from old tap holes. Conventional wisdom is to tap the south side of the tree as that side has sun exposure and will be warmer. I want to log our production per tree from the south side and north side to determine if there is any validity to the practice, but it would be a long-term study of overall production across multiple years to control for weather variations.

Once a hole is drilled, the tap is inserted and the tube pushed onto the tap. The other end of the tube is inserted into the bucket. On level ground, we just leave the bucket sitting next to the tree. In other cases, we use ratcheting straps around the tree and hang the bucket from one of the strap hooks.

We should begin boiling our sap tomorrow – yesterday was an awesome day for sap flow, and we had a lot of 1/2 to 2/3 filled buckets. It’s going to be below freezing for about 36 hours, so figured we could leave the buckets out overnight and begin collecting them tomorrow.

Lessons learned so far: (1) Buy your equipment in the off season. I bought stainless steel taps for under 1$ each, but we needed more taps that I’d purchased. They’re 2.50$ each! (2) Get more storage vessels than you think you need — we have twenty six 5 gallon buckets out in the woods and are scrounging around to find storage containers for collected sap. (3) Collect sap often. Twenty six full five gallon buckets is 130 gallons of sap! If each bucket was emptied when it had two gallons, that’s 52 gallons of sap that gets boiled down to just over a gallon of maple syrup … two or three times, but still it is easier to find a place to store 50 gallons of sap and a couple gallons of maple syrup than it is to find holding containers for 130 gallons of sap.

Low Tunnel Update

We had amazing tomato and pepper plants pop up in our compost. Shouldn’t be possible (compost is hot), but the enormous plants are evidence to the contrary (we have pepper plants that are three feet tall, with more than a dozen little peppers growing). We had a frost warning yesterday, so Anya and I went out to put the greenhouse up over the compost bed. Pulling the CPVC and rebar from the garden bed sounded like a quick task. An hour later … low tunnel greenhouses are not as easy to move as I thought. Earlier in the year, we drove the rebar into the ground with a drilling sledge. To pull it out, we had to dig down about twenty inches. Luckily I didn’t actually *need* all of the rebar — we pulled four of them to get greenhouse plastic over the tomatoes and peppers.

Once the rebar was out, getting the greenhouse together was quick and easy. We’ll eventually have two garden beds — one greenhouse and one where we’ll put the stuff that needs chill-hours. For crop rotation, we’ll switch those each year. Certainly going to want rebar in each bed!

This was also my first opportunity to use the real greenhouse plastic we bought this summer. It is so much nicer than plastic painting drop-cloth. Cost a lot more, too – but there is significantly more light getting through.

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Potatoes!

We finally harvested our potatoes — we got twenty potatoes, so a good bit more than we started with … but no where near what I expected given the size of the plants. I think we planted too late because a lot of the roots had tiny little nubs that would have become potatoes in a few more weeks. Good to know for next year 🙂

Harvesting was fun — we tried pulling the plants, but only found five potatoes. So we started digging around in the soil by hand — got fifteen more potatoes that way, and Anya loved it.

Definitely planting potatoes again next year. Sweet potatoes, however, were a total bust. We had some decent sized vines, but nothing.

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Removing Weeds From Walkways and Patios

We have an aversion to chemical herbicides – both run-off and run-on (Anya feet), so have been trying to find a good way to keep the weeds out of our stone/brick patio and walkways. Crawling around and pulling weeds is rather effective. Anya beams with pride each time she gets a root too. But it isn’t a sustainable weed-control method for the entire space. The string trimmer can be used to quickly cut existing growth, but since the roots remain … they return right quickly. I imagine the root system can only sustain regrowth for so long, but we’ve never managed to chop them enough to prevent regrowth.

We had to clean our water softener’s brine tank – and I figure there had to be some basis in reality for the stories about Scipio Aemilianus salting Carthage after the Third Punic War. Not reality of the “he really did it” sense, but it isn’t like folklore has conquerors spreading well composted manure over the fields to render the soil useless. We pored the brine over our stone patio (I’m sure salt isn’t good for stone … but it had to go somewhere). There is one particular low-growing brownish-red weed that still grows, but it blends in well enough with the stone that I don’t really notice it. Other than that, though, *no* weeds for the entire summer. Burned the lawn some, and this is only useful if you find yourself with thirty gallons of brine that need to be dumped somewhere.

Next year, I have more techniques that I want to test: vinegar, baking soda, and boiling water. Hopefully we’ll find a few more approaches. Then next Spring, we’ll do a controlled experiment. 1/n of the patio and 1/n of the front walkway will be weed-controlled with each method. We’ll see which one kills the weeds without running off into the surrounding lawn and which prevents new growth for the longest time.

Potatoes!

We have corn tassels and a couple of cobs starting!

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Anya and I weeded our potato patch, and found a couple of new potatoes at the surface.

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Our potato plants are huge — and evidently the weather has been sufficiently odd that potato SEEDS are forming. I’ve seen potato plants with flowers before, but the little tomato-looking green things were new to me. We can also tell that part of our potato bed is amazing for growing plants, some of it is ok-ish, and the right-hand third is too shaded. The potatoes and sweet potatoes along the left-hand side look like a massive pile of vegetation. The middle part … well, they look like potato plants to which I am accustomed. The right-hand side … there’s one little sweet potato vine that’s about five inches tall.

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These are all growing in a leaf mulch that formed where the previous owner dumped the grass clippings and leaves from the bottom of the property. After we harvest the potatoes, I plan to mix all of the soil together (the stuff from the left may have its nutrients depleted, but the stuff on the right is essentially unused), add some compost, and then use this as a potato bed next year. Then we’ll start a rotation – definitely bush beans, but I’m hoping to build a trellis next winter & have a wall of vine beans or peas behind  the bush beans.

We’ve got plants!

Corn!!! The corn has been loving the hot weather. Our tomatoes are doing quite well too. We’ve even got half a dozen garlic plants sprouting up. Still need to get some beans planted (we’ll do the greenhouse thing again at the end of the season, so we *should* get a good number of beans even though we’ve gotten a late start of it).

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The largest hop plant is really taking off too. We have four rhizomes from our original two. Although two are *really* tiny little guys with just a vine or three, they all lived through transplanting.

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