Boil down time!

Well I'm glad to say that the last couple of weeks has been good tapping weather indeed.  We had freezing nights and warm sunny days for almost the last two weeks.  As I write this of course it is 34 degrees and snowing/ raining which has definitely put the stop to sap flow for now.  A perfect oppurtunity for the first boil down.
From the 10 taps I have around town I've collected 21 gallons of sap, which should give me anywhere from 1-3 quarts of syrup depending on what sap to syrup ratio our Moscow trees have.  My guess is that it will be closer to 2.5 quarts.  But fear not Palouse Maple Syrup Cooperative members, this is only the first boil down of the season.  With luck we will have a few more stretches of inversion type weather giving us some good runs on sap.
Just so you know, if we don't end up having any more good sap weather the amount of actual syrup available for purchase will be quite small.  In the range of 1/2 pint per co-op member, but that's just the risk you run when making maple syrup and part of the reason that it's become so expensive over the last few years- namely the lack of good sap flow weather in the northeast and northern midwest and the faster transition to warmer tempuratures.  So keep your fingers crossed for frost!

                                            The first boil down of the year.  This batch will be finished
                                           in a certified kitchen but most of the boiling needs to be
                                            done outdoors or you will most likely be kissing your
                                           wall paper goodbye!
MORE ON TAPPING.....                                            
Recently I had to the pleasure to be featured in the Feb. 10th edition of  the Moscow Pullman Daily News in a front page article by Kelli Hadley called "Tap for the Sap."  It was quite a surprise and a pleasure to be on the front page.  It was an informative, accurate and very well written piece but it seems to have stirred something of a small controversy.  The City of Moscow today sent out a press release forbidding anyone to tap any tree growing in a city right of way, and I have been told that this is the last time I will tap maple trees on campus for our grounds shop spring pancake feed since those trees are indeed in a city right of way.  The city also noted in their press release that they disagreed with the statement in the article saying tapping is harmless to maple trees.  And that it can indeed do harm especially to stressed trees.
Well, yes tapping can harm maple trees if done improperly.  That's exactly why I follow the "best tapping" practices laid out by Cornell University, why I don't tap stressed, diseased or heavily damaged trees, and why I use 1/4 inch spiles instead of other commercial spiles which can be up to 1/2 an inch in diameter.  It helps perhaps to think of tapping maple trees like giving blood or milking a cow.  Taking blood from someone with diabetes will certainly cause damage or death, and freshening a cow or goat suffering from chronic ketosis (muscle wasting) may harm or even kill them.  These are both practices done every day all over the country that generally do no present risk, but can in rare instances.
Tapping a tree properly and safely niether benefits nor harms the tree in the long term, and it has indeed been done for decades and decades on intergenerational sugarbushes.  The trees on my sugarbush in Wisconsin and all my friends sugarbushes are healthy vibrant and entirely unharmed despite being tapped nearly every year.  So, if you have any questions at all about how I tap or the methodology I use please feel free to contact me.  Untill then we will all just have to keep looking forward to the delicious taste of condensed local sunshine.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate and give another inversion or two before the end of the season.  Keep your fingers crossed!

Maple tapping and bagpiping

Well the tapping season is just about here.  I plan to start drilling and putting out buckets this week.  I've got five people signed up for the Palouse Maple Syrup Cooperative, all with big old silver maples, one norway maple, and one box elder- most of which are big enough to be double tapped.  My goal was to put in at least six taps.  That would give me enough to make a worthwhile amount of syrup, enough to at least supply the co-op members, but now it seems that I have 12 taps to manage.  Great!
If at some point I can get 50 or more taps in around town the Palouse Maple Syrup Cooperative will be chugging right along.
The Palouse Folkore Society has also been kind enough to include my advertisement for the co-op in thier monthly newsletter.  I got a chance to take a look at it during thier concert series last night.  Dick Hensold, an amazing smallpipe player, was performing and bagpipes are an instrument I love to chat about with other bagpipe nerds but I ended up talking about maple syruping far more.  Seems that there is a lot of interest in this subject around town, hopefully this will translate into more co-op members.
Going back to Dick Hensold's performance... WOW.  He was an absolute virtuoso on the Northumbrian Smallpipes, Reel Pipes, Swedish Transverce Flute, Swedish Smallpipes, and the Pib Gorn (horn pipe).  What a rare treat it was to see him perform here in Moscow.  I'd never heard Piobaireached style performed on smallpipes either.  Piobaireached is a highly stylized form of playing were a melody is cumulatively embellished and variated upon untill at last it becomes an absolutely stunning virtuoso rendition of an otherwise simple two or three part tune.
Now I know I'll probably never get into Piobaireached style playing- it's just too complicated for me, but hearing it performed so incredibly well and on the Northumbrian and Reel Smallpipes nonetheless, made me really want to break out my own sets of Smallpipes and Highland Pipes again.  I've been ignoring them a bit for the last year or so.  The reeds I have in my Dunfion Smallpipes and Highland Pipes have been more than shot for a long time and I postponed getting new ones for even longer.  Finally I ordered some new reeds from Chris Apps in Missouri, and it feels like I'm playing completely new instruments.  The reeds I got from Chris especially make my Smallpipes play like something that cost far more money than I originally paid for them.  Very good investment.  So now I just need some extra time and some warm weather to get out of the house and get back into practice.
hmmm... I wonder if bagpipes sound vibration effect maple sap flow?  Sounds like a good graduate project... or maybe I'd better stick with underwater bagpipe weaving.