This is part 2 of a 4 part series on tapping an abundant resource, maple sap, to make fresh local maple syrup, crème and candy. Parts 1-4 will appear each Friday in March. Part 1, Tapping the Sap, appeared last Friday.

Ok, you’ve had your maple sap taps out there a day or two; the weather has been 40’s during the day, 20’s at night. Let’s go check our buckets and see what we’ve got in them!


See this lane? I had lustful feelings for these maples, fantasizing about the abundant sweet sap I could gather here. (Hey, when you get older, you get your fantasies where you can!). We put about 50 taps along here, and now we cruise along in our biodiesel powered John Deere Tractor, with our DIY rain barrel turned sap collection barrel strapped to the front.


We walk to each tree carrying a 5 gallon plastic pail (recycled plastic, of course) and lift the lid.


Look at that! Full to the brim with sweet sap - about 2-3 % sugar content. When we’re done boiling it down to syrup, it’ll be 67% sugar- and heavenly good!

So now we lift the bucket from the tree …

….empty it into the carrying pail,

….and walk it back to the tractor where we pour it into the collection barrel.

These are actually the rain barrels we showed you how to make last summer - they come in handy for collecting and transferring sap in the off season. When we started sugaring, just a few taps around the house, we just used clean garbage cans reserved for this purpose. When a can was full, we boiled the sap down on the stove in the house. (Hint- don’t do this if you have wallpaper and poor ventilation, unless you want the wallpaper off the wall.)

But today we truck the full barrel back to the sugar shack, where we’ll store the sap within it on the ground in clean 32 gallon garbage cans ….

…….or transfer it to our elevated holding tank until we’re ready to boil. The tank has a reclaimed garden hose that leads to the boiler.

I keep a record of how much sap is collected each day. So far this season it’s over 700 gallons - that’ll boil down to about 17 gallons of syrup. We’ll cover that part next Friday, so stay tuned!