Maple Time All Over Again
It feels like Christmas because the maple sap is flowing!
The 2024 maple season was a famous bust for me, an unsettling cycle of melts and thaws which ought to have meant more ideal weather conditions, but really led to a lot of confusion, and the taps being in the trees for far too long. Luckily 2023 was a good season, and I still have a bit of that harvest to tide me over.
The 2025 season has just started, but I’m enjoying the few days of good flow while we have it. It looks like it might be a short season, as next week’s temperatures are above freezing overnight, and I’m worried the trees will start to bud. Budding is the end of maple season, because the taste of the sap changes once the tree is in bud.
I have 5 maple trees of different varieties. I think only the big one at the bottom of the garden is likely to be a sugar maple. It’s big enough for two buckets, with it’s grand old girthy trunk. But I only have 5 buckets, and only use 4 taps, so that I have one bucket to transport my sap to my sugar shack.
Yes, that’s the official technical term for the place where you boil your sap into syrup. My sugar shack is a covered balcony. The main boil happens outdoors so that the steam can fly harmlessly away on the breeze, and when it has boiled down and is almost ready to bottle, I’ll move it indoors to finish off on the stove.
The buckets are pretty standard. They’re made in Canada, which is a happy coincidence. I’ve had them for years, and they’re still in good shape. It’s the spiles that get damaged — the taps that get stuck into the tree trunk.
Spiles come in two main types, plastic and metal. The plastic ones are narrower, which is good because it means the hole you need to drill is smaller, which is good because it means the tree will heal over the wound more quickly and stay healthy for next year. The problem with plastic spiles is that they are flimsy. Or I just don’t realize my brute strength when hammering them into the trunk, or trying to get them out. Several of them have broken off in the tree, and I’ve had to just leave them there to get healed over and become a part of the tree for far-future archaeologists to marvel and wonder at — trees with bits of blue plastic in them. Not ideal.
The metal spiles are more sturdy, but also fatter, meaning the hole must be wider, which means the wound is bigger and harder for the tree to heal over. The metal spiles are not indestructible either, and several of them are collapsing under the cumulative weight of too many hammer strokes. One year soon I will splash out and get new ones. That time is not now.
Today, the weather is perfect. Springlike and sunny, the snowpack turned from glacial sheet to patches of slush. It was a pleasure to be out, to see the sun in the blue sky, to see grass again, even though it is mostly still brown and dormant.
I can feel the strength in the sun, and that always makes me smile. Especially in March.
It was so nice, I even took my camera with me.
Even if the season ends up being short, I am grateful RIGHT NOW, because I have some few days where I need to be outside, getting fresh almost-spring air, and boiling up maple sap. No matter what is going on in the world of politics or international news, at least there are maple trees, and at least they have given me some sap, and at least I will have a liter or two of fresh syrup to enjoy for the rest of the year.
And I’m grateful for this small mercy.
Thanks for reading!
Very interesting! I knew nothing about collecting maple sap, so this was an educational as well as enjoyable read.
They are my favorite; they're thin and delicious, especially with butter and maple syrup! My dad has a recipe passed down generations (he's 100% Swedish). I'll dig up the recipe tomorrow and send it to you. ☺️