Maple Orchard

[ABS5405]

How long does it take to get a maple orchard established, if the conditions are ideal? Say fertilize and keep weeds down. How many maple orchards are there around? Haven't seen any in this area.

[ennismaple]

Ray and Jamie Fortune just outside of Almonte (west of Ottawa) have a 6 acre maple plantation that they planted in 1990 and 1991 using sapplings that were between 5' and 7' tall that they replanted from within their bush. They re-planted about 500 trees at 21' spacings and I can't remember if they plan to tap them in about 5 or 10 year years. The OMSPA summer tour visited their plantation this past summer. Most of the trees have great crowns and are close to 8" DBH.

Hope this helps.

[farmall h]

ABS5405-Really interesting question. I have never seen planted maples as a working sugar bush. Always thought they grew naturally.

[ABS5405]

Just thinking of making the bush bigger and the field smaller... Seem to get more $$ per acre bush these days. But have to figure in the time it takes till they produce.

[Flat47]

When I was a kid, Kenneth Bascom told me a 12" tapable tree was about 40 years old. Now that we're using the smaller health spouts, I would guess 25-30 years old.

[220 maple]

ABS5405
I know of two planted bushes both in Garrett County Maryland. One is near the Steyer Brothers camp, they replanted small trees in rows, I don't know the date, or how old they are. I remember they told me they was going to tap them last year. They use micro spouts so I guess they are not that old.
The next time I stop by their camp I will try to get some info on the planted trees and how they produced.

Mark 220 Maple

[ennismaple]

If you figure the 5' sapplings Fortune's transplanted were 5 years old, they were transplanted 20 years ago and are now borderline tappable. Basically, if you're over 40 you're doing it for your kids. It is a better use of fallow farm fields than growing weeds and I hope to transplant several hundred if I ever get the time.

[Buffalo Creek Sugar Camp]

I have a small planted orchard that must be 100+ years old. It borders a field. Probably around 300 taps. The trees along the field are 2' in diameter and some back in further are only 12 ". I am guesing they were all planted at the same time, but don't know for sure. The trees are tall with not many branches at the bottom. I don't know exactly what the spacing is, but it is too close for the size of trees. The orchard really looks neat run in tubing though, all the trees are in straight rows and equally spaced apart.

[Gary R]

Check out this web site: www.rpmecosystems.com. Cornell Univ. was developing some fast growing and sweet trees. They turned over the program to this company. I could not find any details on the sugar maples on the web site. I would give them a call for details. I imagine they are pricey. But, if they grow as advertised, you should be tapping in less than 15 years.

[DrTimPerkins]

Check out this web site: www.rpmecosystems.com. Cornell Univ. was developing some fast growing and sweet trees. They turned over the program to this company. I could not find any details on the sugar maples on the web site. I would give them a call for details. I imagine they are pricey. But, if they grow as advertised, you should be tapping in less than 15 years.

RPM is a company specializing in rapid growth of lots of different types of trees. The acronym stands for "Root Production Method", and is essentially a style of high fertilization and air root pruning to develop very high root growth, which translates into rapid above-ground growth after outplanting.

They've been checking around lots of places for seed (Cornell, UVM, Ohio State Univ) for sweet tree seed. Not sure how much they actually got. Even from a sweet parent tree, you can't be sure the progeny will have the sweet tree trait (two reasons....you know the mother tree was sweet, but have no idea of the father tree...and secondly the heritability of the sweet tree trait isn't particularly high).

The saplings they sell are pricy, but supposedly they do grow really fast.

[maplehound]

I bought 100 sweet trees from the Ohio nursery about 8 years ago. 60 of those trees are planted on my fathers farm on a 20x 30 grid. I wanted to plant them 30 x 30 but dad thought 10 x 20, we settled on the 20 x 30 and now wish we went with the 30 x 30. The trees have grown fast and I hope to tap them in about 5 to 8 more years, if my father still owns the farm.
Unfortunitly the state nurseries have closed, and when the last one did they left all the trees unhavested. I was told that they plowed them under and planted soy beans. that includes about 10 acres of sweet trees all still in the seed beds and about 18" tall.
Ohio State University still owns the sweet tree orchard where they would gather the seed, however there are no trespassing signs all around it and the seedlings are chocked out from the parent trees within the first year. They don't even tap those parent treess for production( How sad).

[ABS5405]

What are sweet trees? The same as RPM? Seems to me the RPM might not be as good as they say. Growing season here is not as long here as in Ohio. They likely fertilize and water alot to get that much growth as pictured.

[maplehound]

what I and others refer to as sweet trees is a tree grown from seed that comes from trees that produce over 4% sugar on a regular basis. In the case of Ohio's sweet trees, they are grown from seed that comes from a woods that is not very close to anyother significant amount of sugar maples and that was started from trees that were grown from or grafted from trees that had high sugar content. My understanding is that the trees in their wood lot have always tested over 4%, although have never been tapped for production. I thought that they were going to keep track of the trees that were grown from these seeds in an effort to see if they do in fact continue to produce high sugar content. Two years ago Gary Graham came to my sugar house hoping to get a sample from these trees but decided that they were still to small to get a usable sample from them. I don't know if they have managed to get a usable amount of samples to finish thier study or not but with the nuseries closed down It probably doesn't matter any more.

[Gary R]

I mentioned "RPM", because Cornell Univ. spoke about them in there webinar. I don't know why they have no mention of sugar content the RPM web site. I would think you could take a small sample with a refractometer. Do this with "X" amount of trees and advertise the average sugar content.

Maplehound, have you ever tested with a refractometer? Would be interesting to see how good they are. Anythings got to beat my 2% or less trees.

[maplehound]

I might be able to get a small sample from them this year, but untill now I haven't felt that they were big enough to take even a small sample from.

[Frank Ivy]

Not sure about the long term impact of using fast growing trees.

Typically, the faster a tree grows, the weaker the tree is. This is why white oaks are so solid and white pines snap in high winds.

What is the effect on the Sugar Bush in 30 years when the fast growing trees are full height and the spars are getting big?

What if a major windstorm results in broken branches throughout the bush.

I guess we'll know in 30 years!