Cedar Eater
02-26-2017, 11:06 PM
My wife and I have reached the age where our current house is becoming less and less ideal for us each year. It's time to serious take steps toward a change. We're heading into our sixties and we have another place in mind. We already own the land. I've been hunting there for 25 years. We'll hopefully sell our house for enough to build a new more suitable house there. But that means leaving our sugarbush. We have approximately 150 tappable red maples here, but many of them are not practical for tubing. If we collected from all of them, which would be an awful lot of work, we could maybe make 30 gallons of syrup per year. We're not interested in working that hard or moving that much sap or syrup. Maybe the next owners will be. But we only started making maple syrup three years ago and we don't want to stop.
So where am I going with this? We have a little break in collecting sap and boiling it down because the weather cooled enough to stop production. So we went to our other property today to assess its value as a hobby-scale sugar bush. I knew that we had a few decent sized maples, reds, silvers and freemans. But in order to feel comfortable about starting down the path of moving there, we wanted to verify that we had enough. So we took about a roll and a half of flagging tape to mark trees and find where they are concentrated. As the pic shows, this land is flat, brushy, and wet. We won't have the slope that we have at our current sugarbush, so it will only be buckets, bags, or drop tubes into containers or, where they are sufficiently concentrated, pumped vacuum lines with battery powered pumps.
15761
So we went to the places where I could remember seeing maples before I ever had a thought about tapping them. We started out wrapping flagging tape around every tappable tree, except for those too big to get my arms around. By the end of the afternoon, we were flagging nearby small trees so that we would have enough tape to continue. We ran out. We have over sixty tappable trees there, some of them big enough to have two taps each. It felt great to stand back and see 10-20 flagged trees in several of the areas we visited. We feel a lot better about leaving our sugarbush now. We won't have the great slope that helps us suck the sap out of the trees here, but we'll be happier there. And that's what matters.
It might be another two or three seasons here before we can make the move, so we're planning to set up a pumped vacuum system there next year, or maybe if we have enough slow days, this year. Like starting tomorrow. It would be good to have a batch or two from our future home and some experience with mechanical vacuum collection. At most, two other areas there have a sufficient concentration of trees to justify a Shurflo pump. So I'll add making trails and finding stray maples to my list of things to do there when I have a slow day here. I need more flagging tape.
So where am I going with this? We have a little break in collecting sap and boiling it down because the weather cooled enough to stop production. So we went to our other property today to assess its value as a hobby-scale sugar bush. I knew that we had a few decent sized maples, reds, silvers and freemans. But in order to feel comfortable about starting down the path of moving there, we wanted to verify that we had enough. So we took about a roll and a half of flagging tape to mark trees and find where they are concentrated. As the pic shows, this land is flat, brushy, and wet. We won't have the slope that we have at our current sugarbush, so it will only be buckets, bags, or drop tubes into containers or, where they are sufficiently concentrated, pumped vacuum lines with battery powered pumps.
15761
So we went to the places where I could remember seeing maples before I ever had a thought about tapping them. We started out wrapping flagging tape around every tappable tree, except for those too big to get my arms around. By the end of the afternoon, we were flagging nearby small trees so that we would have enough tape to continue. We ran out. We have over sixty tappable trees there, some of them big enough to have two taps each. It felt great to stand back and see 10-20 flagged trees in several of the areas we visited. We feel a lot better about leaving our sugarbush now. We won't have the great slope that helps us suck the sap out of the trees here, but we'll be happier there. And that's what matters.
It might be another two or three seasons here before we can make the move, so we're planning to set up a pumped vacuum system there next year, or maybe if we have enough slow days, this year. Like starting tomorrow. It would be good to have a batch or two from our future home and some experience with mechanical vacuum collection. At most, two other areas there have a sufficient concentration of trees to justify a Shurflo pump. So I'll add making trails and finding stray maples to my list of things to do there when I have a slow day here. I need more flagging tape.