Done!

Done tapping trees for the year, that is.  I went ahead and pulled taps today.  Its been about six weeks since I put them in; the buds are swelling, the sap is getting a yellowish tint, not to mention that today's high temperature is well over sixty degrees.  It's time to be done. 

fat buds on the maple trees

This has been a spectacular season for maple syrup at this little place here.  I have nearly three gallons of finished syrup, and should net about a half gallon more from the sap I have yet to boil (last week was really cold, and there was no sap all week, followed by a huge rush starting this past weekend). By my estimate I have boiled off roughly 115 gallons of sap and am in the process of finishing another 25 gallons .  That means I've collected 140 gallons of sap this season. From just 10 taps! 

What has been interesting to me is how the production of each maple tree varied from its neighbors.  Of that 140 gallons, a huge portion, maybe almost half, came out of just two trees.  These trees, with just one tap each, practically gushed sap on the hard running days, and maintained a steady drip on other days.  Now other trees barely trickled anything, adding up to perhaps a half-gallon on a 'really heavy' day, and having more than a few days where their taps were completely dry. One tree has been dry as a bone all this week while the others have been running well. What was even more interesting was that the over-achiever trees were not next to each other, and were often within anywhere from 4-10 feet of trees that were stingy.

Hmm.  A science mystery for me to ponder.  What made the capillary uptake of these heavy sap producers so much different from their neighbors?  Could  they, in some way, have been 'stealing' moisture from the root systems of the trees closest to them, hogging the groundwater and minerals, as it were? Or was it just the individual nature of each tree to produce sap at different rates, the way people are individuals with varying metabolic rates? Were they just super trees?

just pop the spile out with a little pressure from the hammer

the hole will heal over, 

just like the one from a few years ago above and to the right of it

Whatever the reason for those two extraordinary trees, the sap run is finished, and I have plenty of syrup stocked for our needs in the coming year, plus extra in case next year's sap season isn't a favorable one.

I didn't get any of the light Grade A syrup this year, but I did get quite a bit that is a nice shade of amber. 

Now all I need to do is finish boiling off the last few buckets of sap, wash all the buckets and spiles to get them ready for storage, and take the milk jugs in to the local recycling collection point. It's time to move on to gardening season at this little place here.