Sweet Season
- iowisota
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
Spring is such a sweet season, in so many ways. Maple syrup is only part of the story!
A challenging part of maple syrup season is determining the timing: Is it time to tap yet? When will sap run? Am I too early, or am I missing out? I put my first few taps out around February 10th, and we’ve been through 3 Springs and 2 Winters since then! We’ve had several fluctuating periods of good sap flow and no sap flow. Natural systems are complex, with many factors. Spring sap flow is a hydraulic process that is primarily fueled by fluctuating temperatures that alternate between below freezing to above freezing, causing vacuums and pressure changes within the tree stem that pull sap up from the roots and release it back down. But other factors interact, including atmospheric pressure, soil moisture, frost depth, and direct sun warming. The art of timing involves being in tune with the weather and observant of what is happening in the woods. Observation and awareness add to the sweetness of the experience!
Once sap is dripping into my buckets, there are many additional stages to the process. I often go out to collect the sap early in the morning, while the ground is still frozen. Early morning is such a sweet time to be in the woods. Throughout the season, I get to watch the woods wake up. I see the leaves of the first wildflowers appear, then get buried in snow, then reappear. I hear different bird songs as the season goes on. One of the great gifts of the season is getting out into the woods frequently. Carrying 5-gallon buckets full of sloshing sap isn’t as fun, but I am grateful for a utility vehicle to ease the burden.
Once I have collected the mildly sweet maple sap, I need to turn it into syrup. That means removing water to take it from about 2% sugar content up to 67% sugar. Sometimes we take some of the water off with reverse osmosis (we remove water to get the sap to 4-8% sugar), then we boil. We boil outside over a wood fire, watching the rest of the water go off in steam. Maybe watching sap boil is boring, but not here. Have you ever sat out by a wood fire along the backwaters of the Mississippi River on a lovely Spring day (or evening) during migration? I think that maple syrup boiling may just be a good excuse to sit to watch and listen to the migration show!
Our finishing process isn’t the most efficient, but we end up with a sweet product. I bring the “almost syrup” into the kitchen and boil it a bit more to get it to just the right density… syrup at 67% sugar usually boils right around 219 °F; I check it with a hydrometer to make sure. Then I filter the syrup to remove the niter (minerals that cause cloudiness), reheat it a bit, and bottle it up. Our first two batches yielded about 3 gallons of lovely light-colored syrup and maple sugar. I’m bottling up another 2 gallons of darker syrup now. Last year we ended up with about 7 gallons by the end of the season, we don’t know what this season will yield. We also made a small batch of very tasty walnut syrup, but that’s another story.
Right now, we are in the middle of a third return of Winter, but Spring will be back by the middle of the week. Syrup making season could continue for a while, or it could be over quickly. We will know it is done when the temperatures don’t drop below freezing enough to reset the hydraulic pump (e.g. get sap flow) for several days, when the sap buckets get a lot of bacterial growth in them, or when we have enough and have had enough! We’ve had a few opportunities to show the process to visitors, but weekend weather has complicated scheduling and attendance at demonstrations. If you want to join the fun and taste the sweet results, check the Iowisota events page to see if I’ve scheduled more demos, or send me an email at iowisota@gmail.com.
No matter when syrup season ends, the sweetness of Spring will continue. It only gets greener and
more exciting from here! We have a few spaces left in the Shiitake cultivation workshop on April 11th. I haven’t started promoting Dwight’s wildcrafted vinegar workshop yet (May 16), but it is on the calendar and available for registration! I’ll be putting some more informal opportunities for nature walks on the calendar soon, probably starting in April. This all means that if you want to join us here for events, you should check in at the Iowisota website or or Facebook page frequently to see what new stuff I’ve posted!
Do you know of any research into the effects (growth rate/health/...?) on maples by operations that use vacuum systems to draw sap vs gravity drip vs untapped trees? Short and/or long term?
So for sugar, do you just keep on boiling past the syrup point? -- I have not gotten enough sap this year to even think about it, but maybe another year. I did boil down about 18 gallons of sap, which yielded about 6 cups of syrup, fairly dark in color but mild in flavor. Hard not to just drink it all straight, forget the pancakes.
I also want to try tapping birch trees sometime.