It's Time for Maple Syrup

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With day time temperatures above zero, Spring is in the air. Already birds are starting to build nests in the rafters of our barn and the snow is quickly receding.

It's also the time of year when the Maple sap begins to run and those fortunate to have a few trees, begin the tapping process.

We were reminded of this by our neighbour Roger, who happens to run the local post office. His family has been on this land for a few generations now, so he is also a great source of knowledge regarding regional history.

One evening this week, Roger invited us to see how he taps the Maple trees on his property.

It seemed a simple operation but we did learn quite a few things including a couple of tricks Roger has developed over the years (like how to prevent the accumulation of black flies in your sap!).

The lesson over, Roger was kind enough to equip Tristan with a "starter kit": a few feet of tubing and some "spiles" (the taps inserted into the trees). He also showed us a couple of good maples on our property (this was a good thing since last fall I had only paid attention to the nut trees and completely neglected to note where the Maples were).

Tristan was excited enough that it was easy to entice him to have a go at it. In order to tap our trees, we decided to use 10 litre water containers. We drilled a hole on the upper corner of these containers and inserted one of our spiles for the tubing. These would provide a nicely sealed environment for the sap (preventing the intrusion of insects).

We then drilled our trees (following Roger's instructions) upward at an angle of about 10 degrees.

We inserted the spile into the tree with a hammer and finally the tubing was fixed to the spiles on the tree and on our container...now it was a time to wait.

Tristan was clearly not satisfied with just tapping two trees so we went to look for more.

To our surprise, we found that the east side of our property is lined with huge ancient Maple trees. This was a great find since it can take 40 years for a tree to grow to the necessary 12 inch minimum diameter for tapping. These old trees were evidently tapped at one time and they were all marked! This made our job of identification a lot easier.

I still limited Tristan to 2 additional trees which he proceeded to tap with the help of Skye.

I limited the amount of taps because I was more uncertain with the finishing of the syrup. It takes approximately 40 litres of sap to generate just 1 litre of syrup and without an evaporator, I was not entirely comfortable with the process.

We decided to salvage an old gas powered samovar from the Tea Room operation in our barn. I figured if it's good enough to heat water for tea, it might just do the trick to process our sap. We changed the container (used a clean 10 litre pot). With a full propane tank, we can run this for a long period of time on our deck (after listening to Roger's processing stories we were reluctant to try this indoors).

Within a day, our 4 taps had produced some 15 litres of sap. Impatiently, we were keen to generate our first batch of syrup. We filled the pot to about 6 litres (the sap tends to foam during boiling so we did not want it to overflow) and after a little less than 2 hours the sap was reduced by about half. We continued to top up the liquid until we were done with our entire collection.

After the addition of the last batch of sap, we reduced the liquid to half and then a little further until it was a golden yellow (we had perhaps 2 litres left in the pot). We then took it inside for finishing on the kitchen stove. The finishing process went much faster than I had anticipated (and perhaps I left it on the stove for just a little too long!).

The result: about a 1/3 of a litre of thick golden Maple syrup. The taste was very good and certainly everyone loved the results; I have to admit however that it was not the very best Maple syrup I have tasted. I think my process was perhaps a little too harsh (too much heat, for too long) so there is just a hint of caramel flavour that overshadows the distinctive light Maple flavour. Also, once cooled our syrup was perhaps a little too thick (its consistency was closer to molasses as opposed to honey).

In conclusion, although the concept of making Maple syrup is simple, there is still an art and science to the process of making the best syrups. I think over time we might just get there. This season alone we should have another good 30 days of processing before the Maple leaves bud and given the amount of sap collected on our first day, we may get some 4 to 5 litres of syrup to practice on.

Wine, cheese, listening to birds chirping in the background, and just watching a pot of boiling sap, I can't think of many other ways to better enjoy a beautiful sunny afternoon. Given the amount of Maple trees on the property, this will definitely become a new Spring tradition for the family.

Tapping trees and making syrup was a lot of fun, but we still had work to do. On the farming side, we decided to start our "Spring cleaning". This has become a huge task.

Given the amount of wood and trimmings left from our pruning and clearing of land, we could hardly determine where to begin.

At first, I thought this would be a good opportunity to generate some wood chips. These could be used as a mulch for our plants.

We decided to bring out the wood chipper and no sooner had we processed a couple of branches, our engine ceased. Only purchased some 6 months ago, this is the second time Canadian Tire equipment has let us down (the first was a Poulain chain saw that lasted 2 months). In this case, the piston was completely demolished.

This meant going back to burning until we could either get the wood chipper fixed or replaced.

This week, we also learned how capital intensive farming can be.

Our Massey Ferguson tractor was clearly on its last leg. After spending a significant amount of money repairing the old engine, we started to face some electrical issues (the tractor needed boosting at every start). I finally decided it was time for a new machine....and of course Tristan was thrilled.

We went back to our trusted dealer (Pic's) and bought a new Landini 1 series tractor. The differences between this machine and the old Massey are phenomenal. This new tractor is so easy to use, Skye was able to get the hang of it in a minute.

Nice features of this tractor include the front loader (we could really have used this on more than one occasion over the past 6 months), 4-wheel drive (we did get the Massey stuck in a few places....usually in the most inconvenient locations) and a very simple hitching process for our PTO-driven equipment (no more risking a pinched finger!).

At the same time, we also acquired a proper flat bed trailer. Although still useful, the old flat bed needed some fixes. More importantly, it was not "road worthy" and could not be easily used to transport equipment.

When it comes to capital investments, hopefully we're now done for a while!

To conclude this fantastic Spring-like week, our neighbor John invited us for an amazing "boys only" barbecue. Great people, beer....and lots of meat! There could not be a better way to end the week.

PS. There is a large Dutch community where we now live (in fact, it is evident when one notices the many greenhouses dotting the landscape). So it was no surprise that Tristan and I had a chance to taste Rookworst - a traditional Dutch smoked sausage.  This sausage was not your typical store-bought smoke "flavoured" sausage. It was actually made locally and the "old fashioned" way, smoked over wood chips. Our opinion: excellent!