The sap is rising!

It's time for the first harvest of the year, and one I have looked forward to for a long time. I remember a fellow tapping birch trees in Lochranza when I was Breagh's age and have harboured a desire to do it ever since. Since we now own our own woodland, including several sugar maples, I have been waiting for early Spring to get doing. Jonathon came over the other day to say he reckoned the time was right - several warm sunny days with cold frosty nights, and the sap should be running.

We helped him put the taps, or spiles, into several of his trees and dashed off to the hardware store to buy some for ourselves. A brace drill, 7/16" (none of your metric nonsense here!) auger bit, 4 spiles, 4 small buckets, 4 plastic bags plus ubiquitous bundle of baler twine were required and off to the woods we went. Luckily, we have several sugar maples at the edge of our woods, at the top of the main pasture and because the buckets need emptying, we looked no further for larger trees. It's recommended that a tree should be at least 7 inches in diameter, but most folk wouldn't tap anything less than 12". We drilled a hole about 6cm deep (a 6cm hole with a 7/16" bit - hey! I'm ambidextrous), on the south side of the tree, about a metre (note, euro spelling) up. After cleaning the hole, the sap was already dripping out and tapping the spile into the hole with a bucket hung on in the center (sorry, couldn't resist), resulted in a satisfying steady drip. Plastic bag over the top in case of rain.

The sap is only 2% sugar, or so, but tastes nicely sweet and can be drunk fresh, used to make tea (note to self: could do with some mint leaves next year) or, most famously, boiled down to make maple syrup. It takes about 30-40 : 1 reduction to make good syrup, so a lot of boiling. Jonathon pointed out "it'll take the paint of your walls" with the steam, so we'll try to put the jeelie pan over the firepit and do the boiling outside.



In other news, Jane has been working with the horses on a daily basis and Mocha, especially, is coming on really well. Kids are doing fine, Breagh has applied to go on a week-long vet camp in Prince Edward Island in July. Cam won 3rd prize in a moose-calling competition! I've just about decided on a new business name, more on that in another post.