The good kind of collection agency

 

Collecting sap - Nothing really technical here. Go in the woods and get the sap. Bring sap back to the truck and bring to the sugar shack. One key thing is to ensure the tank in your truck is tied down, otherwise it will come flying out the back and you will spill 35 gallons on Sandown Rd. Trust me. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap from a sugar maple to make one gallon of syrup. A red and silver maple are about double that because the sugar content is about half. We tap mostly sugar maples however we do have a few red maples mixed in.

 

Happier times when the tank was in the truck

 

Once back to your farm, you can begin to boil. There are a million methods to perform this step but the process itself is basically the same. We’ll be using a turkey fryer as our example here as most people have one and our first question on the blog was about this method. When I first started making syrup as a lad, we typically just set a pot on the woodstove and waited. One major drawback to this method is that it takes a really, really long time and if both you and your father fall asleep, the syrup will become sugar and then burnt sugar and will wake you both up to a smoky living room. We started out our modern operation with a turkey fryer.Most newer burners have kill switches that need to be pressed every 15 minutes or the gas will be shut off, thus avoiding the above mishap. The other advantage is that you are outside so the copious amounts of moisture that is released into the air, versus the kitchen which can peel wallpaper and ruin drywall. Never a good thing.

This turkey fryer works well if you only have a few taps and really don’t feel like spending $1000 plus on a small evaporator. With a turkey fryer, use the pan and fill it about 2/3 full. Once you light the burner, you leave the lid on until you get a boil going and then remove the lid. Use some sort of visual mark in the pan-mine had a scratch that was fortunately at the correct height and slowly add sap to the pot as it boils down. Once you have put all your sap in, you will boil it down. Through the process, you will notice the contents of the pot getting darker-that means you are getting closer.  Aside from the darkening, you will get a few indicators that you are getting close. The bubbles in the boil will suddenly get very small and very active.

 

 

At this point you want to take a spoon and dip it in. If the syrup drips of like water, you have a while longer to go. If it hangs as a drip at the end that is similar to well, cough syrup, You are set. This is the method most old time syrup makers used and still do today. It takes some practice to master this method so we cheat and use a Hydrometer. I’ll cover that another time.

 

A couple of points about sap. It is similar to milk in the way you should handle it. If you leave sap unprocessed and un-cooled, it will start to get a cloudy residue that looks like boogers. DO NOT use that. It can ruin a whole batch. The best plan is to collect every day and process it that day. We store our sap on the north end of the sugar shack where it never gets any sun. This allows it to stay cool so that we can wait a day or two to boil, but if you are using a turkey fryer, do it right away.
That is it for syrup for now. It's all we'll be doing for the next four weeks so a new topic awaits the next post. Stand by...

Some Maple Buckets Look Better on Postcards

 

After getting some necessary modifications to the sugar shack complete, we started step one of the maple syrup odyssey – tapping the trees (Adventure? Epic? Quest? Tragedy?...I guess we’ll know at the end of the season) . As the lazy farmer, I am constantly trying to upgrade and this is a brief recap of how we have arrived at our current method.

As a young lad tapping the trees of the great New Hampshire forests, we were frugal in the truest sense of the word. The sugar bush consisted of four trees and my dad had picked up a couple taps along the way. Our bucket consisted of milk jugs with modified holes for the purpose. The following image is a recreation as we weren’t particularly proud of our method and never took pictures of it.

 

 

With enough attention to detail, you can usually get all hints of milk taste out of the jug and be making a decent sap collector-except for the fact you can only hold ¾ of a gallon. I was collecting in the morning, as soon as I got off the bus and once again at nite if it was really running. Not ideal if you have more than 10 taps.

Now, everyone has seen the steel grey buckets that hang from the trees. These are generally 3 gallons and are galvanized. The main drawback to many of those is that lead solder may have been used on them and they have the potential to release lead into the sap. A low chance but still there. We skipped right over those and tried the modern equivalent:

 

 

The one on the left is aluminum and the right is plastic. Both are lead free. I would love to claim that we were fully researching both mediums for sap retention and tried both for science but the truth was, we bought a bunch of the plastic ones (the main advantage being that you can see the sap level without lifting the lid). As we found more trees, we ran out of buckets and the local hardware store only had aluminum buckets in stock. Both are three gallons also. We still use these in front of the farm as an advertising tool and because we have them so they are going to get used.

Enter the lazy frugal farmer and our current preferred setup:

 

 

That is a 5 gallon food grade bucket with tubing. The bucket cost $3.45 ea for lots of 5 at Lowes and it’s $1.98 for the lid. The plastic maple bucket is $8.50 and the lid is $3.50. I leave the math to you. The tube spout is smaller and better for the tree (and much cheaper than the traditional tap $.39 vs.$ 2.25. If you use a tee connection, you can have one tube going into the side of the bucket and it keeps out dust, rain/snow and ill-intentioned teenagers.  The five gallon bucket also comes with a handle to carry it back to the truck. We run this with a large portion of our taps. This year, we are looking to do a slightly larger version, with a few trees gravity feeding into a 55 gallon drum, and we pump it out to the truck. Pictures to follow. The main reason we haven’t done this is that people are doing us a favor by allowing us to tap their trees- we don’t want to return that favor by having them clothesline themselves on tubing as they walk or snowmobile through the woods:

 

 

That is what we have been up to for this week. Hoping to have all taps in by tomorrow in time for a foot of snow this weekend- perhaps the next topic will be search and rescue techniques for lost sap buckets. We did receive our first question from our friend Eric in Upstate NY :

“What can you tell me about boiling maple sap in a turkey fryer?”

As luck would have it, that will in be my next post so stay tuned…

Confessions of a Lazy Farmer-Is this called the pilot ?

Well, I suppose I should confess at the beginning that I am not in fact a lazy farmer, despite the title of this blog. That being said, it is my life long dream to become one. I dream of a farm where I awake at a leisurely hour and pull a lever to feed everyone and pull a switch to water them. The eggs are all in a nice pile waiting to go by the roadside stand and the syrup is sitting in the pan waiting for a fire. Hay simply sits waiting to be put on the elevator and ascends into the barn to fall in nice neat stacks. This dream is like many other dreams-very attainable, if you win the lottery, which I have not done. But, till that day, I will try and apply Yankee ingenuity and non-standard ideas to our farm in an attempt to find the shortest way to the bathroom, at the lowest price. If they are successful, I will pass them along, as well as  any stories of farm fun , past and present.  I will also tell you about the failures, since those seem to be the ones that everyone likes. I welcome any comments, questions and ideas along the way.

Spoiler Alert: Today we will be getting the evaporator set up for boiling sap in our new sugar shack. Moving a 1400 lb hunk of iron and brick with my wife is always a bonding experience. Full report to follow...

Farmer Phil is now online, ready to answer your questions and give you more insight into the life and work happening here at Coombs Farm!