Winter Harvest!!! Maple Syrup Season.

We all love MAPLE SYRUP!

It is a great natural sugar to use in your household. I even found that there are health benefits to eating maple syrup. Yes, you now have a valid excuse to eat more pancakes!!!

Maple Syrup, that is pure, has been found to contain 24 Antioxidants!!!

And..... it has plenty of Vitamins and Minerals!

We usually drive an hour and a half, to the country, to support a maple syrup farmer. He and his family have been mape syruping for years! They really got us hooked on REAL maple syrup.

But last year we got the opportunity to learn how to tap trees, and boil the sap ourselves.

WOW! It is so FUN!

So I shall attemp to give you an overview of how we make maple syrup.

First of all we need to tap the trees.

You have to tap them at just the right time, right in between winter and srping. You know, about that time that you get CABIN FEVER and you are sure that spring will NEVER come? Yep, that's the perfect time. When the temperature rises above freezing during the day, and goes just below freezing at night is when the sap will flow through the tree.

Here you can see how the tap is in the tree. There is a small hook that you put on the tap to hold your bucket. Also you can put a little 'hood' over your bucket if you are expecting snow or rain.

This is how we tap them:

You first drill a small hole in the tree, just a little bit smaller than the tap. Then you gently use a rubber mallet to tap the "Tap" into the tree.

Depending on the temperatures, you will get different amounts of sap from each tree every day.

I should add, that the best side of the tree to tap is either the south or the east side.

Why?

Well, as the sun comes up and the day goes on, these sides of the tree will warm up better than the other two sides.

Do you know how the sap flows through the tree?

Well I shall explain.

In the fall, as the weather gets cooler, trees will 'prepare' for winter by storing its sap down in the roots. This is one of the reasons that trees lose their leaves.

Any way, in the early spring, when the weather begins to warm up, the tree wants to awaken from 'hibernation'. So when the sun makes the tree warm, the sap will flow 'UP', then as the sun sets, the sap will flow back 'DOWN into the roots.

This is why, in the evening, you are more likely to get quite a bit more sap than in the morning.

Okay, okay, I am done with your science lesson......

After you tap the trees, you just wait for the sap to begin flowing.

We usually collect sap twice a day, unless of course, it is flowing with vigour.

We begin boiling the sap when we have about 15-20 gallons.

This is a food grade 55 gallon barrel. We sterilize it right before we fill it with sap.

We always filter the sap before boiling!

We were boiling our sap on our wood grill, in a turkey fryer pot until a good friend of ours let us borrow his fabulous set-up.

(Thanks Mr. Richard!!!)

This is an old wood stove, and it is very efficient and old fashioned! It was just what we needed.

So we fill the pan with filtered sap, as you can see below. This sap is just getting warm, so it gets a little bit foamy on the top.

We keep the sap boiling and boiling. When is gets close to being finished, we filter it again, and pour it into a different pot to be finished on the stove.

This is almost there!

We have found that the weather seems to effect the color of the finished product.

As we finish boiling the sap, we have to watch it VERY closely. If it is left to boil by itself it is very likely to foam up, and boil over.....

(yes I may have learned this from experience)

There are Hydrometers that you can use to check the sugar content of your syrup, but, we usually just boil it until it looks and feels like the right texture.

These are wonderful Buckwheat Waffles, with Bacon, and our very own MAPLE SYRUP!!!

There was no way that we could wait until the end! The house smelled so good! Besides, we had to make sure that the syrup we were canning up tasted good, right?

I DARE you to try to boil all of your syrup down before you make a wonderful breakfast with it!!!

These are the finished product, all canned up.

Before we can it, we filter it one last time. We did not want to filter out the 'maple minerals' that can settle in the bottom of the jar. So if you want your syrup to be really clear you can filter the minerals out with cheescloth.

Well that sums up the process we use to make maple syrup at home!

It is so refreshing to know that God gave us the ability to be self-sustaining, and that He gives us all we need in nature.

Farm life is the best life!!!

Have you ever made maple syrup?

We would love to hear from you!!!