Sugar % in swamp maples.

[Farmboy]

My grandpa has 6+ acres of woods with quite a few swamp maples. I was wondering what the sugar % is in them because I might tap some this spring. I'm going to need all the taps I can get with the new evaporator. Thanks.

[Sugarmaker]

FB,
I am going to assume that the swamp maples are what I would call red maples or soft maples. I have heard sugar contents all over, but would expect you to get 1.5% as a avg. This may drop to 1 % later in the season? Tap them and check.
Watch the buds which may come out weeks before hard maple.

Regards,
Chris

[red maples]

this past season. mine started out at just over 2% then but ended up just under 1% by the end of the season. '09 season started 2.3ish ended 1.3ish

it varies. also depends on the trees, crown size , weather, health of the tree... the usual!!!

but like anyone who taps them on here will tell you they are finicky sap runners. hook them up to vac and they run like crazy. buckets/gravity hit or miss.

[maple flats]

Identify the maples better. I agree if they are red maples but if they are silver maples I think you will be lucky to get 1% as an average. In my swamps there are few reds, most are silvers. As you get a foot or 2 above the water table you wll then get more reds. These are the only 2 maples that grow in or near the swamps in my location.

[red maples]

Mine are all reds for sure...I have never seen a wild Silver in my area not to say there are none but all the silvers are in yards that were planted there.

[Farmboy]

They are reds. One of my neibors has a few silvers and I tapped them 2 years ago and they didn't run. I really can't run vacume in the woods it will all be temporary tubing.

[maple flats]

In the swamps we have more silvers than any other. It must be the soil/moisture/micro climate here.

[sapman]

I definitely have a mixture of reds/silvers in my swamp. Perhaps someday I'll get a chance to see what the silvers are actually putting out. But like I've said before, the swamp and the sugars were running neck and neck for sugar content the 2 or 3 times I checked.

[Acer]

no vac=no sap with reds.

[red maples]

Well I wouldn't say "no" sap if the weather works out better than this past year, but you won't get that much.

[SilverLeaf]

I've had good luck with Silver maples. In my short tenure making maple, mine have ranged from 2%-3.5%, depending upon the size of the crown. They do bud out earlier, but during the time they're running, they're running good!

[ejmaple]

in my swampy area where most all my reds are, they averaged 1.5 % over the past 3 years that i've been tapping them. they seem to run harder early season then the sugars but end weeks before.

[Brian Ledoux]

hey folks,
Based on some of the feedback in this post, I have a somewhat related question. Near my workplace there is a 150 acre wood lot owned by my company. The land has a couple of walking trails used during summertime and vacant rest of year. The woodlot is pretty heavily wooded with pine trees. There are 4 or 5 different swampy spots in the wood lot that have a bunch of red maples clustered together. Each spot has around 40-50 reds. There are a good number of big trees, 20-30 inches in diameter, but almost all of them have small crowns. Basically the trees only have leaves at the very top.
This year I tapped one spot with about 25 trees and it ran terrible. Only got about 20 gallons of sap total all season. (all on buckets)

I am tempted to tap the 200 or so trees and try to use 10-12 different gravity tubing lines to these trees. Based on what I described, does it sound like a good idea, or destined for failure? Should Iexpect the same amount of sap as I got this year with the reds?

[maple flats]

unless you can set up vacuum it is likely a poor idea. Seems it was posted someplace here that reds might produce poorly on gravity and good with vac. Check it out, I might be remembering wrong. My experience with reds on buckets is I always got for less sap than sugars. I will be setting up my first vac this next season but my main bush has no reds, only sugars. My smaller bush has a few reds but I would not set a different collection to get the red vs sugar volume relationship and vac in that bush may not happen until the following year. Others will know this answer.

[red maples]

Well like the rest of Southern NH this past spring was not the best year probably one of the worst years for buckets and gravity. So I wouldn't gauge anything on that. But tap away but the best thing to maximize sap out of reds is Vac.

[Farmboy]

I'm going to tap all the sugars I can get my hands on and if I have left over tubing I will tap them. I can't run vacume or even a full tubing setup. It will be short runs into small drums. There are too many roads in the woods and it is all flat to run it all in gravity or vacume tubing.

[TapME]

Farmboy, seems to me that they have an endless supply of water to draw from. I use to cut them down in the spring and they would run for weeks. It's more sap and that makes maple. Tap them