Trees budding - now what?

[mlaird]

Are the feelers showing yet?

I pulled out my long lens, and sure enough, there are little feelers poking out of the buds up high. So I have been segregating the sap from my silver maple this week. Yesterday, I did a test boil of about 1 3/4 gallons of sap from that tree that I collected Wednesday and yesterday. It boiled down to only about 1/4 cup of syrup, but a bunch of that was lost in filtering since it was such a small batch. Still, I think it's something like a 60:1 ratio, meaning less than 2% sugar in the sap.

I found that when I first started boiling the sap, it smelled like my wife was boiling vegetables (asparagus maybe?); it didn't smell like the sap did earlier in the season. It looked perfectly clear, however. Once it had been boiled down a bit, it started smelling sweet like usual sap. Toward the end, it was much cloudier than usual, and required more filtering to make it clear.

I tasted it before filtering, and it tasted a bit weird. After filtering, it was much better, but still didn't seem quite normal. So while it may not be a complete waste, it certainly isn't very good syrup-making sap, since it takes so much boiling for so little syrup, and doesn't taste quite as good to boot.

I'll keep trying and see what else happens with this tree. Attached is my telephoto pictures of the buds developing on this tree.