Maple trees to plant

[twitch]

Looking for info on trees to plant. If any one has info or has had some success planting trees i would like to hear about it. I truck all my sap to the sugar house thats in my yard I want there to be some maples around the sugar house. I have herd about Cornell's super sweet trees just want to hear how people have done with planting them and having them survive.Also info on soil preparation. Thinking 20 to 30 trees going to cut all the oaks and pine back from the stone walls and plant some maples.

[Michael Greer]

The people at St Lawrence Nurseries have a super sweet Silver maple in their catalogue. I believe they have a 6 or 7% sugar content, and Silvers are fairly fast growing, and tolerant of a wet site. I planted two last summer, and they were no more trouble to care for than any other tree. I've also planted several regular Sugar Maples just by going into the woods and digging 4 ft. trees and moving them. Trees of that size are pretty easy to move, and are often very dense in the woods, so it's easy to pick and choose the ones that look to be of good growth habit. Be sure that you can make the commitment necessary to water then daily for the first summer. After that it's all up to Mother Nature.

[heus]

Best to transplant in the fall has been my experience. Sugars hate wet soil although they will thrive in it as saplings. As soon as they become 15-20 years old, however, they often die from soil that is too moist. I have some silvers that have sprouted up in my pasture and just in the past give years have grown to 12-15 feet tall. They will be tapable size (although ill probably not tap them) in another 5-7 years. I have transplanted hundreds of trees from our current woods to several other yards since I was a kid. I must admit that sugar maples have been the only ones that were never successfully transplanted.

[bigschuss]

One thought about silver maples…they do indeed grow very fast on good sites and are tolerant of wet feet. However, you might not want them around the yard at maturity. They have a tendency for the roots to grow the surface. It can really make mowing around them a pain. But if you're just putting them around a rock wall maybe that's not too bad.

[Run Forest Run!]

I planted all of the Silver and Freeman maples that I currently tap. They were just whips when I stuck them into the ground 25 years ago. I'm talking 1/2" inch in diameter and 2 feet high, not small trees by any stretch of the imagination. The Norway was a small little tree that I transplanted from my parents' home. They thought it was a sugar maple. Oops. I also have a sugar maple that I may tap in a couple of years. I put him in a coffee cup when a new roadway was being built and I was working on a survey crew. It was only a 4" high seedling. It is probably 16" in diameter now, but I'm waiting a little longer before he is tapped.

This is my third year tapping my trees, and in all honesty I could have tapped them at least ten years ago. I just didn't know that you could tap soft maples. I never get less than 2% sugar from any of them, and at the moment they are running over 3%. If you can find soft maples that have been designed to give high sugar content, you've got yourself a golden ticket.

[SSMGrower]

I planted 10 St.Lawrence Nursery Sweet Sap Silver Maples 5 years ago and all are doing well. I have one of them that must be in the "perfect spot" because it has at least a 5 inch dia. trunk on it already where as the others are all about 3 inches dia.
Bill MacKently said his daughter tapped a 10 year old SSSM and made a gallon of syrup from it


Those who live on low laying, wet, clay farms way be interested in the “Sweet Sap Silver Maple” as a sugar producing tree. I recently found out about this tree while looking through the St. Lawrence Nursery catalog.

This is from the their catalog…

The Sweet Sap Silver Maple is a project that has been in the works since the 1960′s. At that time, H. Cedric Larsson, a regional research forester with the Ontario Dept of Lands and Forests in Maple, Ontario, had found a cultivar of Acer saccharinum with a high sugar content in the sap.It tested somewhere around 3 to 5% sugar content. He gave some root cuttings to his plant breeder friends, one of whom was Fred L Ashworth, the originator of St. Lawrence Nurseries in northern NY state. Fred planted the cuttings and they quickly grew into trees. After Fred died in 1977, Bill MacKently of Potsdam NY took over the nursery. One of the sweet sap maples that Fred had planted was on the nursery property…

The importance of this cultivar is not as a replacement for the sugar maple, but as an addition. Silver maples have more tolerance to wet and/or clay soils. They can be planted on low lands that are not hospitable to sugar maple. They are fast growing, becoming tappable in 8 to 10 years. And this particular cultivar has a higher-than-average sugar content in the sap, which means less hauling and less boiling down.

Using the process of tissue propagation, they are able to make seedlings available for sale. A fast growing tree, higher in sugar than sugar maples and able to grow in wet clay. Might be just what the doctor ordered for some homesteaders and permaculture enthusiasts. Thought I would pass along the information, as I had never heard of this one myself.

[markcasper]

They should be planted in the fall before the ground freezes for best results. Anything I have ever planted in the spring usually ended up not living, while about 90% lived if planted in the fall. I have to laugh at the stores and nurseries pumping tree planting in the spring. Its not that you can't plant in the spring, its just that your not going to have nearly as high of success rate in the spring.

[happy thoughts]

Ditto on fall planting. On another mote, I came across this sugarbush management paper, "A Silvicultural Guide for Developing a Sugarbush (http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmaple/silviculturalguide1974.pdf)", at the UVM maple extension that might be of interest to those planting maples for future tapping. Other good publications at the maple extension site as well

http://www.uvm.edu/extension/maple/?Page=publications.html

[bowtie]

I am interested in the silver maples from st. Lawrence nurseries but cannot get on their website except for a planting guide, does anyone have a different site or catalog download?

[killingworthmaple]

They are sold out for the year. Try again next year.

[RC Maple]

I just planted 20 sugar maples that I got from The Arbor Day Foundation. I realized I may never tap them but I thought it would be a great idea anyway. I have some seedlings growing in the woods but the biggest would be about 2 feet and most are smaller - I thought I would go with bigger trees. I too transplanted some sugars last fall and they seem to be looking good now and leafing out. Hopefully my experience with spring planting will be better than some of yours. I didn't plant mine right next to the sugar house - I didn't have space there but they are only a couple hundred yards away and tubing could be run. Just have to sit back and watch - and water.

[Michael Greer]

Right now, with all this rain, you can go into the woods and dig and plant trees about three feet tall with ease. They have to be watered for their whole first summer, so don't plant more than you can carry water for.

[3GoatHill]

Ha ha, I've always had the most success planting in the spring, you just gotta keep em watered. If you want a catalog from St. Lawrence you have to email them your address, but I don't think they're accepting orders now.

[Revi]

We have been planting fairly large Freeman Maples lately in projects. They are a really tough tree. We planted them right by the sea, and on a fairly compacted former parking lot and they seem to be thriving. A common type is the Autumn Blaze. Here's a little about them.

http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ldplants/acfree.htm

They are a cross between a silver and a red maple, and they are great if you want them to grow and thrive.

[Ittiz]

I could probably rustle up some sugar maple seedlings. Was going for a walk the other day and plucked some sugar maple seedlings out of a soft embankment on the side of the road, perfect size for shipping. You'd probably want to wait till fall though since they've leafed out and that's not the best time to transplant them. On the other hand if you tap sugar maple trees you can no doubt collect some seedlings yourself. Just look in locations where you know they won't survive due to shade or what ever and transplant the little guys.

[tuckermtn]

looking to revitalize this thread -

I just recieved as a belated birthday present 8 of the cornell super sweet sugar maples. Looking for advice on how to prep the soil (amendments, etc) how big to dig the holes, and what type of spacing (10 ft grid, 20 ft grid, etc) we should be looking at.
full sun, partial shade, etc...

I have a lot of experience cutting trees down, not so much with planting them.

I hope that my grandkids can tap them when they are 40 yrs old...

[NhShaun]

I suppose the hole size will depend on the root ball of the tree. How old/tall are these trees?

[3GoatHill]

Cornell has super sweet sugars?

[sjdoyon]

Cornell has super sweet sugars?

A syrupy story
Some 50 years ago, about a dozen forestry researchers identified a batch of “super sweet” maple trees, plants with more sugar in their sap, at various locations in New England, New York and Ohio. In the 1960s they planted seeds from them at Proctor Maple Research Center, on private land in Jericho, and at Williams College, Ohio State University and a Cornell University station in Lake Placid. They then tracked these “mother” trees and their progeny.

Baribault and fellow UVM botanists Timothy Perkins and William Currier picked up this work and continued tracking the maples’ sugar levels. Through additional funding from North American Maple Research Council and, later, the USDA National Research Initiative, Baribault pressed forward with the work, and from leaf and bud samples he is now looking for DNA “fingerprints” that might distinguish extra-sweet trees from the rest. These identifying genetic markers will aid breeding programs and shed light on the signaling mechanisms that regulate a maple’s sugar-production process.

“This is just the beginning to finding out how trees make more sugar. There’s not going to be any one gene that makes a tree sweeter than another. There may be a half a dozen and not every sweet tree is going to have them all,” Baribault says.

The rationale of the work is obvious: The sweeter the sap, the less fuel needed to make syrup. Better still, the sweeter trees actually produce more sap than their counterparts, so they represent a potential economic boon to producers. The sweetness advantage of the super-sweet trees is significant. Regular sap averages about two percent sugar. The progeny of the super-sweet trees average six-to-seven percent with some higher than 10 percent sweetness, Baribault says.

While he’s been tracking the trees since 1997, Baribault feels that after this season he’ll finally have enough data to publish his conclusions. “It’s all kind of coming together this year,” he says.

But progress, he allows, will be slow, even with sugar makers working to identify sweet trees, and Cornell providing inexpensive cuttings from sweet trees. The maple’s long lifespan and the pace of research means that it will be a long time before super-sweet maples fully enter the nursery trade, and longer still before old sugarbushes are renovated with production-ready super-sweets.

“This is just the beginning of many future decades of applying molecular biological methods to sugar maple breeding. I’m 50 and this project was started 50 years ago,” Baribault shrugs. “I’m never going to retire. This is what forestry research is all about. What we’re really doing is giving people an opportunity to keep the forest going. By making it possible to produce a comparable amount of syrup in less time and with less resources, the sweet tree research will [keep the forest healthy] and the fingerprint project will help us track and continue the diversity of maple.”

[DASH]

I also have questions. We have about 4 acres of land that we want to plant maple trees on, we understand these will most likely be trappable by those who come after us but will complement nicely the now useable sugar bush we have.

Like tuckermtn I'm wondering how far apart I should plant these trees for best results, and are the Cornell Super Sweet Sugar Maples available for purchase?

Any help would be welcome

Thanks

[Machinist67]

Here you go. This is a great nursery to deal with.
http://www.fknursery.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/home.showpage/pageID/125/index.htm

[DASH]

Thanks! I'll be making a call

[Dennis H.]

Plant them like a vineyard.
With the new study going on with topping sapplings and using a cap to collect sap from them it may be a way with a few acres of field.
If the study is correct, you can make a heck of alot of syrup from an acre of young sapplings.

[DASH]

That's a GREAT idea! I just read about the trial and sounds like now would be a perfect time to try it.

This small field has been hay for the last few years and is a pain to get equipment to, so my wife suggested we plant maples there for future use - make sense! Making a portion of this field a trial of the new tapping method sounds like a winner. Thanks for the suggestion Dennis.

[treeguy]

You could always try that planting method and if it does not fit your needs just not cut any tops off a few trees on 25' centers so they can grow large. I would do that anyway since its still a new idea :-)

I would say plant spacing has to take into consideration your equipment. You want to drive a mower or bush hog or whatever. I bet 4 acres planted rows will be a good size order of trees..