“We have a family birthday on March 17th,
and that was always the day we started tapping, but this year, some of
the boys who’re working in the woods are saying the sap running is running
already.” So says Mona, who has been tapping maple trees with her
father all of her life, using the same methods her father has used all
his life.
“The only change is in drilling the trees.
We always used a brace and bit, but some people are using battery operated
drills now. It’s very hard work, just drilling the holes.
“The first thing you need to do, is drill
a hole in the trunk of a sugar maple. It can’t be a rock maple; you can
tell difference by the way the limbs grow. When you drill, you want to
be off to the side from the last year’s hole, never up or down from it.
In a tree that’s got a two foot trunk, you can put four spiles. If it’s
a younger one, eight inches or a foot across, only put one or maybe two.
With some of the old maples, you have to check which limbs are alive at
the top, because some sides are dead. You don’t tap the north side, ever,
because the sun doesn’t light it. The best weather for maple tapping is
a cold night then a sunny day.
“Into the drilled hole, you’re going to
put a spile. A spile is a little thing, a metal tube with a hole in the
end of it. There is a hook on it yo hang the bucket. When the sap is flowing,
the buckets might need to be dumped three times a day. It gets hard work
to carry buckets upon buckets. We use pails, and if they get too full and
heavy, they’ll pull the spile right out of the tree. At the end of the
season, you replace the spiles with pine plugs, so the tree doesn’t keep
leaking.
“We carry the buckets of sap to the boiling
pots. We use those black iron pots; you see a lot of them for flower pots.
We boil outside, with wood underneath. About every three or four days we
take it out and finish it in the house. You have to be really careful about
regulating the fire, because it can boil over and turn to candy. Once it
gets boiling over, if you don’t pour in some cold sap and cool it right
down, well, then she’s gone. We’ve had that happen before.
“It takes 40 or 45 gallons of sap to make
a gallon of maple syrup. A couple of years ago, we made 30 gallons of syrup;
we had 100 spiles or more. The boiling is hard work too, because you have
to be right there, tending the fire, and putting on the wood.
“Our family uses maple syrup for a lot
of cooking; on pancakes and instead of brown sugar in baked beans. It’s
really natural, not quite as bad for you as some of the refined sugar.
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REAL RURAL WIMMIN STORIES