Originally Posted by
Greenfin
This is a great topic.
I have been tapping over the past 10 years in three different states and this is my 4th year in MN. I have a urban super bush. I have to go around in my suburban neighborhood and ask people to tap their trees so I am hyper aware of the factors that cause trees to produce more sap then others. What I can’t figure out is why some trees produce almost nothing?
My best producing group of trees are all on the same street. They all lie next to a drainage area that catches runoff water. Most of the year it’s just grass right now it’s a creek.
My single best tree is on the top of a hill in the front yard a guys house who doesn’t water his lawn and the ground is dry even during the thaw.
More later.
Several years ago, when I was on buckets I had one very large sugar maple on a knoll that was about 4' vin diameter. Being fairly new to maple I put 3 buckets on it, each about 1/3 of the way around the tree. I had a northerly facing tree that filled the bucket and over flowed almost every day, all I had to test at the time was a short hydrometer, that only gave the results in 1/4 of a point. That bucket yielded 2.5-3.25% on many days while the other 2 buckets rarely yielded 1/3 to 1/2 bucket and about 2% sugar. The tree looked well balanced, no major limbs missing, and no sign of damage that I could see. As I pulled the buckets each year I did it after the leaves were about half size, and the leaves looked the same over the entire tree. I never did figure it out. Since I was gaining more and more taps, I gave up that lease because it only had 28 taps and I was then doing leases with 100 and 700 taps, besides that lease was about 4 miles out of the way from my other leases.
Dave Klish, I recently ordered a 2x6 wood fired evaporator from A&A Sheet Metal which I will be converting to oil fired
Now have solar, 2x6 finish pan, 5 bank 7x7 filter press, large water jacketed bottler, and tankless water heater.
Recently bought another Gingerich RO, this one was a 125, but a second membrane was added thus is a 250, like I had.
After running a 2x3, a 2x6, 3x8 tapping from 79 taps up to 1320 all woodfired, now I'm going to a 2x6 oil fired and a 200-425 taps.