Tree to Table
"Tapping, Gathering, and Boiling" Bet you have never heard of that before. But that is the way sap from a maple tree is made into yummy maple syrup!
You start tapping the tree by drilling a two inch hole into the trunk of a maple tree. *Hint: When tapping be careful not to split the bark. To tap a tree the tree must have at least a diameter of 10 inches and 31 1/2 inches around. Also, the tree must be 50+ years old. It doesn't matter where you tap the tree but it would help if it was over 4 1/2 feet high. You should tap the tree at an incline going up or the sap won't come out. There are two popular ways to tap a tree: buckets (older way) and pipeline (easier when it is already set up). Pipeline is when you hammer in a metal or plastic spout into the tree, then attach the tube to pipeline which goes from tree to tree and back to the sugarhouse to boil. The other option is buckets. That is when you put a metal or plastic spout in the hole you drilled and hang a metal bucket on the hook . The sap goes out through the hole in the tree and drips into the bucket which you collect when it gets full. In Vermont we mainly sugar from Sugar Maples, Red Maples, Silver Maples, and the Box Elder.
The next step is gathering the sap from the buckets. The pipeline allows the sap to go right to the sugar house. With buckets you need to go out to the woods and gather the sap to pour it into a bigger bucket attached to a truck, tractor, ATV, or horse. Some people like horse better, but some like tractors. Tractors are a lot easier to ride, but they get stuck. Horses can get stuck too, but that happens very rarely. With pipeline you don't need to gather the sap, but sometimes animals chew it up or it cracks in the cold, so you need to fix it. The sap goes right to the tanks, and then the R.O. Machine, "Reverse Osmosis." The takes out 1/2 to 2/3 of the boiling time because it takes the water out of the sap. Without an R.O, the water is boiled out of the sap. R.O.'s are very expensive and not all sugaring operations have an R.O.
Boiling is the last step to making maple syrup. Some facts are that 1 cord of wood makes 30 gallons without the reverse osmosis, 1 cord of wood makes 300 gallons with a reverse osmosis. You can boil around 55 to 60 gallons an hour, and 3-4 hours at a time about 30 times a season with a reverse osmosis. Matt Playful (Local Sugarer) uses 12 cords of wood a season. The Howrigans (another local sugarer) boil in a one room school house! If you don't know what "boiling" is, well it's literally boiling maple sap to turn into maple syrup!
Tiffneys R.O.
