Site Discussions

I was digging up the roots to a old shrub came back 10 minutes later and found a luna moth caterpillar neon green,feed back.

Calcium chloride or magnesium chloride placed into the stems after cutting in late summer works to eliminate this weed. Can’t be worse than applying Roundup right?

Hi Dave—

Were you using check valves this year? We “upgraded” to check valves this year on our 550 taps and experienced much the same ending as you did - sap clearly running in the woods but not in our two-month-old tap holes. Couldn’t tell if the check valves hadn’t come through or if they had already given us an extra week.

We averaged .20 gallons per tap - a bit better than usual in our red maple-dominated woods, probably due to natural vacuum in the skinny tubing.

Thanks as always for sharing your thoughts with everyone.

A sad day but we still enjoy your commentary and consider them a ritual of our late winter and spring.  Just wait til next year when we will give it Hell again.

For the very first time I have a flying squirrel living in one of my tress.  It is so cute. It comes down at night to eat out of my bird feeder.  They are not considered rodents according to our fish and wildlife biologist.  They are very similar to a sugar glider.  I quess I’m lucky to live in the country where I can appreciate all wildlife.

Hi Dave - thanks for the annual reports again. We had a similar experience to you. We just boiled our last batch on the 11th - like you we were just tired and ready to be done. We made about 5 gallons shy of our goal but it took a little more than a cord of wood extra than usual to get there as we struggled with sap ranging from 1.2 to 1.5. It was a weird season. Time to clean up, pull the taps, and start thinking about the garden.

The bark looks very similar to American elm. An id trick is to remove a loose piece of bark and snap it; if there are alternating creamy-white layers inside, it’s American.

No, the leaves don’t persist in winter.

Very interesting article!

A farmer in southeastern Vermont has this to say about the low sugar content this season:  “I have been consumed by the sugaring season which has been excellent thus far. Volumes and volumes of sap have been harvested and sadly the wood piles have taken it on the chin. The culprit is weak sap. It makes sense, last summer’s grass was voluminous but the quality of the hay below average due to lack of sun - this translates to the sugaring season too - the trees didn’t have optimal sugar producing weather…” Lack of sun last summer was significant in this corner of the state, where the skies were overcast until September. Not enough sun for surplus energy generation to get us through the winter, either.

Dear Mr. Caduto:  I was very fascinated by your website.  As I have been searching to find out what I might have in our wood pile.  For several years now, I get 4 cords of wood, which I have delivered and I stack on pallets.  I have encountered the usual mouse, as we live within 100 feet of woods so mice I am familiar with in the wood pile and in our house.  However, this fall as I was removing the wood from the pile that had been delivered to the stacking area, I had about 20 pieces of wood left to stack.  Well, did I get a fright.  As I had two pieces of wood in my left hand and was taking a third with my right hand, this fiesty little grey rodent litterally ran out from under the remaining wood and ran around my feet squeeking!  I have never encountered this before.  Especially, for a rodent in which I had not cornerned.  I then proceeded very carefully to use my ergoonmic snow shovel to carefully move each piece of wood toward myself, as I knew this creaturel was hiding under the remainining pieces of wood.  When I finally reached the last piece this rodent actually was quite upset and moved away about 15 feet squeeking as if he was upset his “home” had been dismantled.  I have been attepting to find out what type of rodent this is.  And I believe according to your description and your fellow readers, I have a shrew.  A few weeks ago-mid March, I was walking toward the remaining wood pile, which now consists of 20/30 pieces of wood, and if I didn’t hear his whistle.  As if telling me, leave his home alone!  As I was removing the wood very carefully, he had scurried about 10 feet away and whistled.  As I get my wood at night to bring into the house.  I am now using a pole to remove the tarp carefully and moving each piece of wood before I pick it up.  Possibly your other readers have had similiar situations.  I certainly will not trap the little guy, as I am sure he is eating the spders and bugs that like to nest in the wood pile.

I have learned at Pocono Environmental Education Center that black bear eat skunk cabbage first thing when they awaken from hibernation.  They do this because it is a diuretic, and it cleans them out from their months of winter sleep.

Enjoyed reading this well-written article by my colleague Yurij Bihun.  Having worked in Romania on these issues for more than decade, I could not agree more that a historical lens is essential for understanding anything related to forests and forestry in that part of the world.  For more information on our research using remote sensing to document illegal timber harvesting, please see:

http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/wkeeton/pubpdfs/Korn et al. 2012_Biological Conservation.pdf

http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/wkeeton/pubpdfs/Knorn_et al_Loss of old-growth-forests in Romania_Env Cons_2013.pdf

Likely the purple is harmless, and it will likely disappear as the spouts are seasoned in the tree. I wouldn’t worry about it too much this year. Longer term, though, if it were me i’d upgrade to 5/16” spouts. You get something like 90% of the sap with a lot less wounding to the tree. And they’re made out of plastic, aluminum, or stainless steel, so the oxidation problem will go away.

No discussion of the external appearance of the bark -  probably a very distinctive feature. Do the dead leaves persist in fall and winter?

We have some old taps, cast iron, from the 1940s. They cleaned up nicely but the first bit of sap that came from the trees through them was purple in color! We are small scale hobbyists but we’re given 300 of these taps from a friend to help us upgrade our operation. What should we do?

Reading your assessment of the season so far sounds like just one steaming load of good news after another. Thank goodness that maple sugaring is so much dang fun and easy money too! And you only have to do it for a few weeks in the nice spring weather!

Hello. I have found a big bees nest in a hole in a tree by my house. It is about 10 to 15 ft High. They look like honey bees but I’m not 100% sure. I drilled the hole in the bottom of the tree and this black liquid started pouring out of it. Can somebody tell me what this liquid is? And if they are honey bees, how would I get to the honey? Thank you for your help.

Y’all think raccoons could be taught sign language? Like, are the hands good enough (even w/o opposable thumbs)? And surely they’re smart?

I tried using Ivermectin once to treat a wild fox who lived near my house, but because the fox wasn’t captive, I couldn’t ensure that the affected fox was eating the ivermectin-laced food and not some other fox or different animal. And if you research the drug you see it’s very dose sensitive and some species of dog have toxic reactions to it; it seems reasonable to think some wild animals might, too. All of this said to me that it was a bad idea to be trying to administer a drug in the wild in this haphazard way, so I stopped.

Hi, I does seem wrong to cut down trees to make a fence post! I’d rather have the post be the tree and increase in strength over time.
To avoid using any metal on our tree, we are using polymer nails (all plastic) to screw insulators directly on trees to cover 10 acres of wooded pasture.
Raptor is the name of the company that makes the nails.
We use claw insulators (2 nails/insulator) on all in-line trees.
We keep an eye on them but if insulator get swallowed by the trees, we can chop them off and install new ones. The plastic won’t be a problem for sawing the tree in the future.