Tapping Maple Trees

We tapped three maple trees near our home yesterday. We made maple syrup for the first time last year. It was a lot easier to do than we thought it would be and was lots of fun.

You can see how close the trees are to our home. This tree is much the smallest of the three.

After the hole is drilled a spile is gently hammered in. The spile is a metal tube which acts as a spout for the sap. We wire a plastic jug that we’ve cut a hole in to the spile.

This last photo shows the metal spile with the wire holding the jug to it.

This tree hasn’t produced much yet. One of the trees we tapped yesterday has already produced a gallon of sap. We keep a large pan on our wood stove filled with sap which slowly evaporates. Most of the sap is water. Periodically we’ll take the concentrated sap and boil it down to make syrup. Evaporating on the wood stove saves lots of time.

March 5, 2014