Thursday, February 26, 2009

Learning to make Maple Syrup

Well Gang It is a beautiful Day here In Caroga Lake.....52 degrees and the sun is shining. Dave (also goes by Dan too) lives down the road from us, has started to do some making of Maple Syrup on his property , I was lucky enough to be able to help and learn how it's done. Today we tapped some maple trees, something that I have never done or witnessed how it was done. There is at least a couple ways of tapping the trees...One is to hang a bucket under the tap and the other is to tap the tree and connect the trees after tapping by using a hose to bring all the sap to one location for collection. This is us tapping trees and using hose the empties into a bucket (Dave in photo) More of trees that we drilled holes into the connected together for collection.
These are his neighbors trees that we started, sap was running as we drilled and was running thru the hoses
Back on Dave's property tapping more, Brian you know this road, we walked it during hunting season, back to the tree stands.
Tree tap and hose leading into green bucket.
In the old days they used buckets, Dave is using plastic jugs... trees tapped and sap running in through side of jug for daily collection.
We will doing more on Friday morning and Collecting sap to be boiled off at a later time.
All though it was very warm today some spots I had to use snow shoes to get to the trees, if you didn't you sank down to your waist..
Til next time gang...... , Jerry

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I am Fred from Albany and West Caroga Lake. Thought I should introduce myself as we will probably meet over a stove someday soon. I threw together the stove Dave plans to use for evaporation. I hope it will keep up. You guys are tapping quite a few trees.

It has been fun watching you referee the wild ones on the bulletin board. Keep up the good work.

See you soon,

Fred, of Fred and Shanna