Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Liquid Gold

 


I was hoping our neighbor would come by with the offer to tap our trees in exchange for receiving a gallon of finished syrup at the end of the season. But he seems to have retired. So instead, Dad dug four buckets and taps out of his barn and brought them here last weekend. We drilled on Saturday, broke a drill bit on the last tree, and now we're waiting. Daytime temps have still been around freezing, so the sap isn't flowing too strongly. But when I got home from work today each tap was dripping a little.

We don't really have the facilities for boiling. If you do it inside, you end up with steaming sap covering the walls and peeling off wallpaper. I'm thinking that I'll try to boil most of it off on the grill on the weekends, then finish it inside. Ideally, we could get as much as 4 gallons of syrup, but that would only be if we had the time and energy to boil down 160 gallons of sap, and I don't see that happening. I'll be happy with a few pints, and the fun of doing it.
Posted by Picasa

1 comment:

AllBeehive said...

That's so awesome. I've always wanted to do that. Is that all you do is boil down the sap? Are there any other ingredients?