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…