We collect the sap in milk jugs. We store them in the cool garage until it is time to boil them down.
We don't have the traditional sugar house or the flat evaporator pan. So instead, I boil them down on our screened in porch. We use my regular electric skillet...
...and my 18 qt electric cooker. It cooks the sap pretty slowly but it gets the job done. I just have to keep a timer going so I don't forget to go put more sap into the cookers. You can see that it is starting to get its darker color already.
6 comments:
What's the sap-to-syrup ratio after you boil it down? That is, how many gallons of sap does it take to make x-amount of syrup?
Betsy
If we had sugar maple trees, the sap to syrup ratio would be 40 to 1. We have red maple trees so we have to boil an average of about 45 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.
2 gallons of syrup is usually enough to keep us in syrup for a year so that is my goal.
Hey There!!
I love looking into your blog. I have been having more and more of a desire to live a homestead way of life. However, we live on 1/2 acre so that definitely limits what we can do in that way. Thanks for posting!!
Christine Griese
Well, if you have a sunny place, you can make a garden. Or make friends with someone with lots of maple trees!
That's my plan, make friends with someone who does homesteady stuff and live vicariously through them. ;-)
So do you plan to build a sugar house in the future?
Your yard must smell so good in this season!
The porch certainly smells good now that the sap is getting more concentrated.
I think it would be fun to have a sugar shack in the woods in the future. But for now, I'd settle for an evaporator pan and some kind of wood burning setup so I could process it faster.
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