Making Maple Syrup

YesNoMabee is my photography side-business. I didn't "borrow" this from somewhere else ;) 

Click Here to see my first Tapping Trees Post

I owe you all an update! After the last post we rushed out to the farm store and bought 10 more taps! Oh and buckets too (we had to make it official). For the first two we had created buckets out of empty yogurt containers but soon I was happy we had upgraded as A LOT of sap can come out of a tree in one day. 

There were a few days when the buckets were filled to the brim. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but not that much! I also had a couple taps the barely dripped at all the whole season. I will have to remember not to tap those ones next year.

Where does one keep so much sap???

The sap took days to boil down. Every morning when I got up I would start the pot back up and add new sap. I would boil it until it got low enough for me to add more. This went on for over a week.My favorite part was scooping some of the half-sap-almost-syrup into a mug and drinking it like tea. It had a great maple flavor and wasn't boiled down enough yet to be too sweet.  

A lot of people had told me that I would need to boil it outside because it would create so much humidity indoors it would "take the wallpaper off the walls". BUT, I'm a rebel and didn't listen. If I were you, I would have listened to the helpful advice. It was very humid for quite a while. My walls were dripping. My tropical plants were in heaven...

All-in-all we started with about 13 buckets of sap and ended with two mason jars ( 2L total) of finished syrup. One litre of maple syrup from the farms around here sells for about $22. So we got just about $45 worth of syrup out of the deal. We invested about as much as that so we broke even. The real deal is that we can reuse all the supplies next year. This is absolutely something I will do again!