Originally Posted by
DrTimPerkins
That was definitely the way people thought 25+ yrs ago. However with good vacuum, reds will produce quite well. We went from having no red maples tapped in our sugarbush to about 1/3 of our taps being red maple. We make plenty of great tasting maple syrup.
We do have a project starting next spring comparing sap yield, sugar content, timing of buddy flavor development, wounding, and syrup flavor. Dr. Abby is the PI on that project.
That sounds like a very interesting project. Please post the results of that when done.
I have no more sugars to tap so I will be tapping some Red Maples next year. I plan to set up some kind of vacuum on them.
I tapped a few this year along with a silver. Got decent sap flow on gravity to buckets.
They never showed more the half a percent sugar this year. Had a home built RO to deal with them however and they made great syrup very much if not the same as the sugar syrup.
With that said I would still tap the sugars over the reds if I had more to tap, but I do not, so I will tap the many Reds I have.
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If you think it's easy to make good money in maple syrup .... then your obviously good at stealing somebody's Maple Syrup.
Favorite Tree: Sugar Maple
Most Hated Animal: Sap Sucker
Most Loved Animal: Devon Rex Cat
Favorite Kingpin: Bruce Bascom
40 Sugar Maple Taps ... 23 in CT and 17 in NY .... 29 on gravity tubing and 11 on 5G buckets ... 2019 Totals 508 gallons of sap, 7 boils, 11.4 gallons of syrup.
1 Girlfriend that gives away all my syrup to her friends.