You Can Make Maple Syrup in Your Backyard
March is time to tap your trees, and boil down gallons and gallons of clear sap into rich syrup
The best way to welcome spring in Michigan is by tapping a maple tree. If you’ve ever done this, you know that spring doesn’t arrive when the crocuses bloom. It comes even earlier, with the new sunshine and the just barely warmer air, with the tap tap tap of a spout into bark and the first few drops of clear sap dripping onto children’s tongues.
Between the middle of February and early March, temperatures reach their perfect balance of warmth and cold: around 40 degrees during the day and around 20 at night, so the sap in the trees can run again.
During the winter months, when temperatures stay around or below freezing, maple trees drink up moisture through their roots and replenish the nutrients in their trunks and branches. It’s a reminder that during those bleak winter months we endured, beneath the surface of everything, the land and the trees and the plants and insects were resting and restoring vitality for the coming seasons. Winter can do that for us too.
For three years now, we’ve joined some neighbor friends to tap the maple trees in our backyard. When the coming weather looks right, they walk down to our house, and their older boys help drill holes for the taps. We hang our buckets and lids, their aluminum catching the new white light of spring. We’re mindful to tap the trees carefully, spacing out the the holes, changing location each year, and removing the taps after the trees start to flower so the bark can mend.
We went simple with our gear. Our friends bought our taps at our local hardware store, and we bought vintage buckets and lids off of eBay. If you want to get fancy, or have a good number of trees to tap, there are hosing systems and very sanitary-looking food-grade plastic buckets. Or there are clever ways of using plastic milk jugs. Our lids sometimes blow off in the breeze and bugs get in, but we still prefer the glint of the old school metal.
The children go out to check the sap buckets each day, sometimes running back in to announce with jubilance that they are overflowing, and sometimes with a sigh that there’s hardly any to collect. Our yield depends entirely on the fickle whims of the weather.
We strain out impurities and bugs and pour the sap into a large barrel to be boiled down later. Our first year, we did this on our stove, creating a steamy sauna in our kitchen. For the past two years, though, we collect our sap over a few days and then take it to another friend’s house to be cooked down on a large outdoor evaporator—a process that takes patience, much like winter, though it’s mesmerizing to watch the sap slowly boil down into deep amber syrup.
Although most of us have tasted good-quality syrup, as you’d guess, even the best store-bought stuff pales in comparison to tasting it fresh from your own trees. The flavor is complex and almost buttery. For those wondering, 40 gallons of sap yields about one gallon of syrup, so we cherish our stock of jars throughout the rest of the year.
When the neighbors make what they’ve come to call their “sap walk” to our yard, we moms visit outside for a little while as the children gather sap and play together, and at the conclusion of sap season, we have a pancakes-for-dinner feast to celebrate and enjoy the fruit of our work.
As with many chores, and especially when you go about them them with friends, tapping maple trees gives a pleasing rhythm to daily life. And for us, anticipating the project as winter wanes, it marks the very start of spring, as though we are all waking up.
