our sugarin' story

I think it was last year's Maple Syrup weekend that got my husband Mike thinking about making syrup. He has worked hard and long to make it happen. Here's how it went this past Sunday, with some excerpts from Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

"All winter," Pa said, "Grandpa has been making wooden buckets and little troughs....He made dozens of them, and he made ten new wooden buckets. He had them all ready when the first warm weather came and the sap began to move in the trees. Then he went into the maple woods and with the bit he bored a hole in each maple tree, and he hammered the round end of the little trough into the hole, and he set a cedar bucket on the ground under the flat end."

Well, I don't know why Mike did not spend the winter making wooden buckets and troughs...instead he saved up 1 gallon milk jugs and ordered sap spouts on Ebay. Before the sap began to run, he tapped the maples that he had marked in the summer, and hung the modified milk jugs...

"The sap you know is the blood of the tree. It comes up from the roots, when warm weather begins in the spring, and it goes to the very tip of each branch and twig, to make the green leaves grow. ... Every day Grandpa puts on his boots and his warm coat and his fur cap and he goes out into the snowy woods and gathers the sap."

We used both sugar maples and silver maples. As daytime temperatures began to climb above freezing and night time temperatures dipped below freezing {also known here as 'Mud Season'} the sap began to flow. Each day Mike, or sometimes I, would head out and collect.

"Then he hauls it to a big iron kettle that hangs by a chain from a cross-timber between two trees. He empties the sap into the iron kettle."

This is our 'Sugar Shack' ~ the framework is constructed from the trunks of pine trees, and the walls are stacked cord wood. A tarp over top is its roof...

"He empties the sap into the iron kettle. There is a big bonfire under the kettle, and the sap boils, and Grandpa watches it carefully."
Mike found a barrel stove and constructed an evaporator--the metal framework around the stove that holds the stainless steel restaurant-style pans, which he located at a thrift store...
This is the sap we had collected for Sunday's sugarin'.

Collecting firewood for the stove...

"The fire must be hot enough to keep the sap boiling, but not hot enough to make it boil over."
Here it is getting started. The front pan is used as a warming pan to heat the sap, which is then moved to the back pan to continue boiling down.

"Every few minutes the sap must be skimmed. Grandpa skims it with a big, long-handled, wooden ladle that he made of basswood. When the sap gets too hot, Grandpa lifts ladlefuls of it high in the air and pours it back slowly. This cools the sap a little and keeps it from boiling too fast."

We did not have the problem of our sap boiling too fast--just the opposite, it seemed to go much too slowly...not coming to a full boil. It seems some modifications will need to be made to the evaporator. Though only 25 degrees outside, we were cozy in our little Sugar Shack reading and knitting while we waited...and waited for our sap to boil down.

Finally it had boiled down enough to move to a smaller pan on a propane burner...

As it continued boiling down we watched the temperature, needing it to reach 7 degrees above the boiling point. We moved it inside to smaller pans...

...and finally, 12 hours after starting with 6 gallons of sap, we had maple syrup. We ended up with just over a pint of golden goodness. This is a tiny bit extra that I poured into a recyled bottle...

And I have to say, that on my pancakes the next morning, it was the best maple syrup I have ever tasted!