A Story of Sap Flowing

It is the end of March and the sap has pretty much stopped flowing, but earlier in the month it was abundant.  In fact, on March 8, when it was 10 degrees and sunny after a solidly cold night, I collected about eight litres from the two maples I tapped this year, better than the 2 degrees and half a litre I collected the day before.

The trees are really two separate trunks of a substantial maple clump that grows next to the small stream that flows from the pond next to our branch of Stanbrae Road (though it is a pond only some of the time – as A., the eldest of my granddaughters, wisely informed me one day at the age of five, “It’s a swamp, Rogie.”).  One of the trees has a thick yellow nylon rope with a thumb knot in the end of it hanging down over the stream, and A. has always enjoyed grabbing it and swinging over the water (or the rocks, when my “pond” is once again a swamp). At any rate, it has been spring throughout March, the stream has been flowing from the pond, I have worn my Bogs to step across to the trees, and the sap has been flowing fairly well.

I drilled the trees, hammered in the two spiles, and hung up my President’s Choice cranberry juice containers to catch the sap.  On a good day I might empty them several times into the 10-litre container I kept there, and sometimes there was even an overflow of my precious sap running down the maple trunk.  On a not so good day, I might not get much more than a few flies in the containers checking out the sweetness in there.

I didn’t have permission to boil my sap down inside the house and didn’t want to use the propane cylinders for the little Coleman (like I did two years ago), so I bought a big pot at the Sally Ann and built up my outdoor fireplace to accommodate a grille for the boiling.

The ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1, so the 20 litres of sap I had collected should be good for half a litre of my own Stanbrae Road maple syrup.  They say it takes 15 hours to boil your sap down, so I got my fire started and kept on feeding it, getting myself, my jacket, and my jeans pretty smoky in the process.

The sap started to boil, and I kept topping up the pot, feeling a pleasant satisfaction as my sap supply reduced and what was in the pot was beginning to show some colour.

I will stop there in the telling of this ultimately cautionary tale to inform you that the sharply bright first quarter moon is high in our black sky tonight, reflecting pinpoints of white light on the car’s roof and hood.  And I will continue the tale in my next post.