All Things Natter: March 2012

For Christmas Scott got some maple taps from his sister, Riki. He was so excited about them. Here's proof of that excitement. It makes me smile every time I see that picture.

So, for a few weeks now we have been collecting sap from our maple trees in our back yard. Scott tapped three trees, each tree having two taps. Then as the weather started warming up with above freezing during the day and just below at night, the sap was flowing and we started collecting.

In that two week period or so, we collected nine gallons of sap. For those who have never made homemade syrup, this would seem like a ton of syrup. Not so. Once the sap has been collected, the water needs to be evaporated out. That was our next step. We started a fire outside in our fire pit and placed a grilling rack over the fire. One the rack we placed two foil roasting pans and added the sap to the pans and began evaporating. It took about 6 hours to evaporate the nine gallons of sap.

After evaporating nine gallons of sap, we got down to this pot of sap. Then began the boiling process. The idea to get the right consistency of syrup is to find the temperature of boiling water (in a separate pot) and then boil the sap at about 7 degrees above that. It took another two hours or so for that process.

And here is our end result! About a pint of sap with a little left over. We tried our homemade maple syrup the next day and we fell in love with it. It tasted so good! Maybe it's because we worked so hard to make our syrup that it tasted so good, but either way, it was fun! Thanks for the taps Riki!

Here are just some other fun pictures of our family. Enjoy!