Maple Syrup

I remember being a little kid and going to my great grandparents in the spring.  I loved pulling into their yard and seeing the tapped trees with buckets hanging! We would ride out to the woods with a little tractor and wagon to collect sap.  If my memory serves me correctly they had a sap boiling pan set up in the woods and someone there to stoke the fire and watch the sap.  Great grandma would save the syrup in milk jugs.

Last year was our first year making our own maple syrup as a family.  We tapped 12 maple trees.  One of them turned out to be an ash so we had to remove that tap and put it in a maple.  Thank goodness Caden was there to check our tree identification skills!  The kids and I loved the process of tapping, collecting, and cooking down the sap.  We burned the first batch.  Kian tried to make it into candy but it still tasted like burnt syrup.  We learned it really does go fast when it gets to the end.  We didn't burn the next batch.

This year we tapped 24 maples.  Hopefully they are all maples.

-Lisa