Ack. Someone recently trimmed!

[Groves]

I'm small fry. We just got permission on 20+ trees at a church. They're excited, and so are we. It will double our humble operation.

I drove by the other day, and saw that someone had been brought in to trim the trees. Ugh.

For the maples, this mostly means that some of the lower "clusters" of medium sized branches are thinned out to one.

These are all mature trees.

From a tapping standpoint, I realize it would have been best to trim just after the season last year.

Will their being trimmed a month ago affect my ability to tap them? Will all of the sap be running out of the wounds instead of into my buckets?

We could tap any day here. Prolly should have already.

[Haynes Forest Products]

The wounds will dry out and close up from bacteria growth. Keep a look out and see how long they wheep. question is if the roots send up the sap less branches less need for the sap............more for you................YES or NO???

[collinsmapleman2012]

the sap wont make it up there til later in the season. we designed mini experiments at school and the trees we tapped 15 feet up didnt run til the end of the season. i think its because the sap moves up and down the trees and dont go that high unless its warm for a while

[Revi]

You can probably tap them, but it's going to be a hard year for the trees with the limbs cut off and tapping too. A guy wanted to trim all the columnar maples at our school. I told him that they were supposed to look like that. They are a cultivar that grows that way. Thankfully he didn't trim them.

[red maples]

depends on the size of the tree and how much was trimmed. The Road crews are out and about in my town right now and they do a pretty good hack job with the road side trees. Honestly I think they take way more than they need to. but last year I missed them and they took a few huge branches off my road sides not tapable:mad: I was pissed to say the least but this year I already caught them this morning and asked them to spare my maples along the road by my house!!! They had no problems. I did ask if they knew the difference and they said yes, I said reds too right they said sure!!!

[DrTimPerkins]

There will likely be some seepage from the cuts, which will reduce your sap yield to some degree.

Under gravity conditions, sap moves UP during the freeze cycle, and will fill all the functional xylem vessels within the tree from the top to the bottom (if the freeze is slow enough), then will freeze. When the next thaw happens, sap will flow down (by gravity) and come out any hole that is present in the wood. There will be less pressure and less flow in the branches and upper stem than in the lower stem. Why? Think of a tree as a pipe stuck in the ground and filled with water. If you put a hole in the bottom, the water will run out until all the head pressure is relieved, and then stop. If a hole is nearer the top, it will flow less quickly with less pressure, and will stop much sooner. The pressure at the taphole (or wound) is proportional to the height of the water (head) above the hole. 1 ft of water = 0.43 psi. So an 80 ft tall tree will have about 34 psi sap stem pressure at the base (max) as soon as it thaws out. So why didn't a previous poster see a difference 15 ft higher....because the difference is small, only about 6.45 psi, which is fairly small. If you used a very good pressure gage, and made sure all the air was out of the system (air is a compressible fluid and will mask the changes in pressure in the sap), you will be able to measure the difference in stem sap pressure. However the difference in sap flow would be quite minor at that difference in pressure.

So why don't you get a lot more sap if you're putting a hole in this big pipe? Because a tree isn't one massive pipe -- rather it is a whole bunch of very little pipes (like if you took a huge number of tiny straws and hooked them all together), so when you drill a taphole, you're actually only severing a relatively small number of straws. When you use vacuum though, the much higher pressure differential will pull sap horizontally through the tree (gravity can't do this), resulting in accessing the sap in more of the straws.

All this to say....if you have a cut limb up in the crown of the tree, some sap will leak out of that wound, but not all of it. You'll still get some from the base of the tree....but it will be less.

If a lot of the crown/branches was removed, you might consider NOT tapping for a year to allow the trees to recover from the loss.