A Message from the North Country

I have wanted to try making maple syrup for some time now, so finally I decided to do it. It took a while, since spiles were not easy to find – in fact, most people I talked to in hardware stores had never heard of them, and Lee Valley, the logical choice, no longer carries them. I would have thought otherwise, because various websites I looked at suggested that it was both easy and popular to tap a few trees and make a little syrup, and it was certainly not limited to rural environs, but there were no spiles to be found in the Halifax area. However, I was lucky enough to find a hardware store down in Tantallon that had three in stock, so I decided that I would tap three of the trees that were big enough (I don’t actually have many more than that anyway!).

Our trees are red rather than sugar maple, but the sources said that they also work well, and I now know that they are right. Our maples are not really big, and they have grown in clusters of trunks rather than as single large trees. The ones I chose are from one clump next to the driveway, and they seemed like good candidates – big enough and situated where the sun would shine on them for a good part of the day.
The day I tapped the night had been cold, the day was warm, and the sap was running. The flow started as soon as I made the holes, so I tapped the spiles in quickly and set up my buckets. It was very gratifying. I estimated the blue bucket to be collecting two drips per second, while the other two were about half as fast. I tried to keep the flow from leaking down the tree trunks because I knew how precious every drop was.
The flow was good for the first two days and I poured over five litres of sap into the 10-litre plastic jug I had and stuck it in the cold room to wait for the rest of the sap to come. However, my great initial production petered out, and I got less than a litre over the next couple of days. Then it stopped entirely. I figured that the holes had dried out and sealed themselves, but then I read that sap production can be sporadic, and that you need a good solid freeze at night, something we haven’t had for quite a few days now.

So I decided to boil it down.
I used the little Coleman stove.
And I finished it in the house.
It didn’t make much.

But it’s maple syrup all right, it tastes really good, and I made it myself! And with a solid freeze forecast for the end of the week, maybe I’ll fill that little jar yet!