Taps per Acre?

[220 maple]

What is your average tap count per acre? I have been marking a woods for next season and have been avgeraging around 70 per acre. I know that it far better than my sugar bushes.

Mark 220 Maple

[vermaple]

I've always heard that a woods should be thinned to about 80-85 taps/acre.

[3rdgen.maple]

220 I marked a section of trees yesterday that I cut a new tractor path through to tap some trees that have never seen a drill bit before. I flagged 178 taps in about 2 acres. I was being on the conservative side of things as well. I still have about 80 more acres to go. Only problem is the maples are scatterd around in about 2 acre sections. These sections have never been maintained for sugaring either. So I have slowly been gettin cull trees out also. All nice trees 95 percent are 16 inches and bigger. Not all are sugars though some are reds and a couple of the sections are all reds then there are a couple sections that are all sugars. Plan is to add about 200 taps a year but this up and coming year I am getting a little ahead of myself and the plan is for 400. Why did I not buy the 3x8?

[sapman]

I think my sugar maples are about 70, the reds probably considerably more. The reds seem to be rather self-thinning. I recall 80 would be on the high side.

Tim

[PapaSmiff]

I'd like to pose this question again, to see if we can get more answers.

What is your average tap count per acre?

I'll be selling my house this year, with it's 5 Maple trees. I hope to find a property with a wooded area and, hopefully, some maples.

Some people had mentioned an average of 80 taps per acre. Is that in an area that is mostly, if not all, maple trees? Or is that in a "mixed" area, with other types of trees?

I'm hoping to grow this hobby beyond my 11 taps.

[maple flats]

My better woods is about 55-60 tapable taps/acre and it is quite good, mostly predominately sugar maples but many are too small to tap yet. Likely to get to maybe 70 max someday. My otherbush only has pockets of sugar maples and I only get about 35-40 taps there. My guess is that any over 55-60 would be considered above the norm but that is only a guess.

[DrTimPerkins]

Getting a little long in the tooth, but see
http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_square/publications/research_papers/pdfs/scanned/OCR/ne_rp286.pdf

[Jeff E]

A rule of thumb I have been going by is up to 100 Trees per acre, but there should be 25% other species of trees for the health of the woods. That would leave roughly a 20'x20' canopy space per tree, so 75 tapable trees and 25 other varieties.

[Buckshot]

This year we intend to put in about 155 taps. We took our GPS out into the bush and made waypoints for every tree we want to tap, and we used a different waypoint symbol to differentiate trees with 1, 2 or 3 tap potential.

Using the resulting data on an interactive map, I've determined that out of the 16 acres we own, we will only be tapping just two small sections. The first being an area of 1/3 acre with 32 taps, and the other is 2.5 acres with 123 taps.

Thus we will average about 50 taps/acre.

(The 155 taps represents 117 trees; 85 single taps, 26 double taps, and 6 triple taps.)

Our sugarbush is actually a mixed deciduous/coniferous forest that we've owned for 3 years now. It has not been "managed" or thinned and thus the maple trees compete with hemlock, fir, oak, beech, birch, cedar and ironwood on typical canadian shield terrain. Last year on 85 taps we made about 40L of syrup - or basically 1/2L per tap. Way below normal values, but good enough to make it a worthwhile hobby. :)

[adk1]

I will be lucky to have 20 taps per acre in my so called sugarbush

[twofer]

~50 taps per acre