Maple Syruping

Take 2 bored kids on a cool spring day with snow still on the ground. Give them power tools and find a tree and see what happens Carefully lining up the hole and boring in about 2 inches with a 5/8ths drill The tree will heal itself creating its own type of bandage. This is one of our bigger maples in the resort. Setting the spout in the tree.. really does not need a hammer but we decided to not tell Conner that Off to find a few more good trees Syrup bags and power tools how much better can a Saturday get? Notice we were limited by how far we were from an outlet because Steve and Craig have stolen all the cordless drills leaving Troy with the plug in drills Conner hanging up his hammer for a power drill It cost 10 dollars for the equipment for each tap for the tap, bag and hanger. I know many who also use buckets with lids to keep the deer out and spouts hooked up to lines for bigger operations that go directly into tanks Tapping tree number 4 on the hillside was more of a challenge. We figured with the sun on the hillside this tree would be flowing soon. You need nights that go below freezing and days that go above freezing to get the sap running. We may be a week early but are ready Always important to remember to blow out the hole so you don't get saw dust in your maple juice. Bring on spring we are ready! It takes around 76 gallons of sap to boil down to 1 gallon of syrup. You can also make maple candy if you boil it down further. we shall see what we manage to collect. Sap starts flowing we may put a few more taps out. Stay tuned to see how this experiment goes. Troy and I both did it as kids making maple syrup but it has been quite a long time. We picked up our supplies from Minocqua Hardware, John the owner is a maple syrup expert who's family bottles and sells their product