Site Discussions

Your description of sap flying out of the vacuum exhaust pipe is all too familiar to us over here in northwestern PA!  It has been full on, all out, these last 3 weeks trying to get our woods tapped and sugar house ready for such a large pulse of early season sugaring.  Best of luck to you- may the cooler forecast give us all the breathing room we need to get ready for the next run!

Loved this! great writing: poetic, funny and informative. As always a most engaging style. Thanks Dave Mance.

Thanks for the analysis. It’s very interesting.

I found this helpful. I need to ID sugar maples and red maples because I plan to inoculate (25) 4’ bolts of freshly cut red maples and 25 bolts of sugar maples with shiitake mushrooms. I want to keep the species separated to see how each performs in the production of the mushrooms.
The angle of the branches and twigs will be most helpful from viewing on the ground before they leaf out.

Nice article, Susie. I enjoyed it immensely.
NPA

Their belly fur is thin, Pat. I’d guess the animal is fine.

I’d first consider co-existence, David. Other than some tunnels in your pond bank, I can’t really think of any problems they’ll cause you. And they’re fun to watch. If you’ve got to have them gone, find a local trapper and ask them to take care of them for you. If you don’t know any trappers in your town, contact the Illinois State Trappers Association and I’m sure they will be able to help.

I am curious as to what “maa-maa-maa” means. I hear it quite a bit over the years only by one specific crow. I have my crow family of usually 3..sometimes 4 or 5. But mainly 2 or 3 on w regular schedule. Unshelled peanuts of course. And any other healthy scraps. One particular crow follows me when I walk my dog..and follow the car certain distances. I don’t ever feed them outside of my yard. He’ll call to me at these places…store parking lot, my son’s school 5 times. I think I’m identified as 5 to them. But I call him “five”.

Algonquin Park in Canada has recorded ice out date since 1964:

http://www.algonquinpark.on.ca/news/ice-out.php

Similar trend.

I had a skunk at my compost bin this morning, but noticed some tracks that were not from a skunk. So I just let my dog out at 7:45 PM and thought I would check out by the compost for anything black and white. As I looked down through a grate on my step low and behold was an opposum. I spoke to it and shined a flashlight and it came to peer up at me through the grate. Is it normal for them to have a coat so thin that you can see their skin through it? I thought maybe it was sick.

I just tapped my trees today, I am a beginner. I was given a starter kit as a gift, it came with 3 taps and 3 buckets and accessories. I tapped my trees this morning, temp has been around 34 during the day. I have not seen one drop of sap yet, am I doing something wrong?

What is the best method of ridding my pond of muskrats? I do not have cat tails and very limited vegetation yet every spring they show up. Thanks for your advice.

That’s a really interesting question, Ross. Proctor Maple Research Center recently did a study on tree size versus sap yield, and found that trees under 10 inches in diameter produced about 1.5 pounds of syrup in a season under maintained high (25”) vacuum. Translating that into layman’s terms, I think that’s around 6 gallons of sap per tap. So put a bucket on that 8” maple pole, and maybe you get 3 gallons of sap in a year.

I don’t know what each theoretical additional taphole would give you in yield, but it wouldn’t go up in a linear way; in other words, two taps wouldn’t give you twice as much sap. This is a complete guess, but under gravity-run conditions (ie buckets), maybe a second hole would give you 50% more sap. A third, 10 or 15 percent more. But under high vacuum, I’m not sure you’d get much extra yield at all with additional holes, because the vacuum draws sap from around the circumference of the tree. So additional tapholes compete with each other for yield.

So that’s as far as I can get you off the top of my head. The bottom line is, I don’t know. But I am confident that it wouldn’t be a lot of sap. The trees give you sap and they only give so much; you can’t really break in and take it.

How much sap CAN be removed from a tree? Say you have decided to thin a pole stand of maples that have never been tapped. The trees that are going to be cut soon can be tapped without regard to their future survival. Kind of like selling the bark off a paper birch tree before it’s cut for a saw log. How would you go about harvesting the total sap supply before the tree stem goes into the pulp pile?

For the sap to run it has to freeze, then get above freezing—you’d really like to see it get in the 40s. Then it has to freeze again. Each time it does that you have a “run.” You don’t get a run everyday, as the weather doesn’t cooperate every day. Whether you have a good season or a bad season depends on how many of those runs you get in a 4 to 8 week window.

What if some days are above freezing, but other days are at 31 as a high?

My wife and I live in a trillium woods on Blue Mountain very near the Appalachian Trail in Linden, Va. We are leaving most of our little piece of land 4.5 acres in a natural state - leaving the dead-fall.  We have been here for over 30 years and have watched fallen tulip poplars, locusts, oaks slowly rot away. We have watched the dogwoods decline and have echos of the American Chestnuts through sprouts which appear less and less.  We are living in fear of emerald ash borers which will devastate this area shortly….Question:  We had five large trees fall across our nature trails through our woods - would you take a chainsaw and clear your path or just find a new route? What would a true naturalist do?  I love the natural woods and seeing the process working over time.  How do you feel about this?  What do you think?
What is best for the trees?
More info:  Our woods were clear cut with a few exceptions over a 100 years ago and the tulip Poplars dominate. Some people would say take out some of the Poplars to allow the other species to grow. The Ash will all go soon sadly and make more space.
Thanks
Richard

From my understanding the warn daytime causes the sap (sugar water) to flow down.  Pressure builds in the tree above ground as the tree warms up.  Night time the tree cools down and creates a negative pressure (vacuum) and draws water up the tree.

Wonderful!  News from the sugarbush is like a “Right of Spring” for our family.  I am delighted to hear your reports and know that this season is back in swing.  Keep it going; I love your writing.

Wonderful article. I feel like I have written the article in a sense. Many of your expressed thoughts are similar to mine. I only run 10 taps and no vacuum. Wondering about this season. I have an office job but can’t wait to go at it again. Been sugaring for 30 years.

Jim