Maple Syrup Season
Many Mainers I’ve spoken with will tell you that March is their least favorite month. The novelty of winter has worn off and any hint of snow in the forecast is no longer met with the giddy anticipation it may have elicited in January. Spring feels right around the corner, yet seems to take forever to arrive. What’s no longer ice is now a thick, sticky mud. But there are those magical, warm weather days in March when Mainers chop wood in t-shirts and soak in the warmth of the sun. And on those days, the sap is flowing.
This year my family and I decided to try tapping trees to make maple syrup. We had never tried it before but were eager to learn, not only in hopes of boiling our own sweet, sticky syrup for Sunday pancakes, but also as a way to give us something to keep our spirits high in March as we count down the days before we can launch our boat this summer. One of the best things about being an educator is that I always have an opportunity to learn something new and share what I’ve learned with others. I decided to turn my family’s first try at making maple syrup into a class for Nature Links. We documented our process along the way through videos and photos and compiled everything into a presentation to share when we had finished. I learned so much along the way and was grateful for the opportunity to merge a fun family project with the job I love so much.
A slide from our recent Nature Links class about harvesting maple syrup.
We started by learning as much as we could from friends and neighbors who have years of experience while filling in gaps in our knowledge with youtube videos and websites. We purchased some used equipment from a farm in Vermont via Ebay (about $30 for 5 spiles, buckets and lids) and set out on a quest to find a few sugar maple trees in our neighborhood. With no leaves on the trees to help us out, we tried our best to compare pictures of sugar maple bark with the trees we found near our home. We even rustled up a few leaves from near the trunk of several trees to see if we could spot the telltale 5-point leaf that would let us know we had a sugar maple on our hands.
A slide from our class. Students helped me learn to identify sugar maple trees using their leaves and bark.
Unfortunately, we realized sugar maples were harder to find than we had imagined! Red maples and birches were the only trees nearby that broke up the landscape of thick spruce. Luckily, we soon learned that 10 species of maple can be tapped for syrup (plus birch too!) so we settled on a few red maples with sunny, south-facing trunks on our own property, along with a gorgeous sugar maple at a neighbor’s house we were given permission to tap. With a 7/16 inch drill bit, we drilled a hole into each tree at an upward angle about 2 inches deep. To our amazement as eager newbies, the sap immediately started flowing! We gently tapped in the metal spile, hooked on our bucket and installed the lid to keep bugs, debris and rain out. We had done it!
Once our equipment was set up, we checked the forecast. Large temperature differential between night and day creates pressure in the tree that allows the sap to flow. We checked our local weather for cold nights and warm days to know when we’d need to check our buckets. Somewhat surprisingly, the sap that collects in buckets is not sweet at all and in fact, tastes more like “tree water” than anything you’d drizzle onto a pancake. We knew we’d need a lot of sap to make enough syrup to share together even for a single breakfast. 40 gallons of sap is needed to create just one single gallon of maple syrup.
The last few days of March are here, marking the annual “Maine Maple Sunday” celebrated at sugar houses across the state (Maine produces the second highest amount of maple syrup in the country after Vermont). We’re still collecting our sap and hope to get enough to make all our syrup dreams come true. In the meantime, checking our buckets every day to reflect on “good” or “bad” sap conditions has given our family something to talk about, and a lot to look forward to as we inch towards spring, one drop of sap at a time.
