Is it too early?
Its supposed to be at or near 40 and below freezing at night all week.
just

I am tapping Thursday. I should have already started but I procrastinate. Getting everything cleaned up and ready now.

How many trees are you tapping? I plan on tapping about 45.

7 walnut trees in the yard.
Wish it was maple but none on this property.
just

I just tapped today. 10 trees. It's just barely running now. 40 and cloudy here. Question, I have one big maple that I tapped last year that really produced, the sap is brown this year. The sap wood was white where I drilled the holes. What causes this? I did dump it out so hopefully it clears up. Also, is it alright to tap a tree that has old fence wire in it?
Mike

I started yesterday and had just a little bit of sap today. Wasn’t even worth emptying the bucket. With the weather we are having, they will be flowing soon,

Starting Fri. Only about 50 buckets myself but buy a couple of hundred from 2 neighbors.

We are getting buckets, lids, tubs out by our trees and along the trails. We won't be tapping for several days for two reasons. We needed a snowmobile to pack down the trails and can get through most areas, but snow in the woods is 12-30 inches deep and carrying sap out in buckets will not go well until the warmer temps shrink the snow down several inches. We also are looking at several nights around 20 or a tad lower and that freezes in the buckets and that is not good for our system. We will have 100-200 trees we won't tap until we lose quite a bit more snow.

Bryce

Mike, did it happen to rain there and maybe that was run off from the tree? I have had that happen before.

I tapped about 40 trees today. More tomorrow. Just going to make a small amount this year, enough for family and friends. Not even going to fire up the RO.

I have 75 taps out so far and will collect for the first time tonight.

Volunteering this year to help a local group with syrup. March 6th is tap day and see how it goes. Has been 20 years since I tapped a tree, did it with my Grand Pa and Dad back then. Good memories.

Dave

I am farther south than anyone that has posted so far. I tapped Sunday and only 3 tree's. I have collected 2 days and have 10gal. of sap. I can only boil down on the weekends, so I don't want much more that 25 ~ 30 gal. at a time.

aka just walnut makes good syrup.

Never had walnut syrup, but I have a lot of walnut trees I could tap. How many gallons of sap does it take to make a gallon of syrup?

It should be about the same as maple ( 40-50 gallons). Birch and sycamore will be closer to 100 gallons.

Dunno. Tried it first time last year. Made a baby food jar (that's 4 oz) from 1 tree. Maybe 1/2 to 3/4 gallon. Its sweet and doesn't taste like walnuts.
just

Information I have reviewed shows that sugar content of walnut sap is similar to or only slightly less then maple sap but that the walnut trees only produce half or even less the sap of maple trees and thus why one gets much smaller production. The syrup is however very much desired if one has commercial options.

Bryce

Thank you for the replies.

Goldnut, It rained a day or to before. It's running clear today. Not sure what went on, lol.

walnut is close to maple in amount needed more like tapping red maple then sugar so little more needed.they don't run as much sometimes. but the taste is very similar and you prob can't tell the difference much. just do it the same way you would maple and you should be fine. birch is where it doesn't work exactly the same.

Biggest question on whether to tap walnut- is it worth it to bore holes in a tree that potentially could be worth a load of money in the veneer market?

I will start tapping tomorrow finished running 1400’ of 1” mainline today. Can’t wait to get the whole new vacuum system up and running this week. Goal is 1000 taps!

My buddy tapped 100 trees on Thur and collected 45 gallons of sap on Sat. No sun today so there probably wasn't a run today.

We will finish tapping tomorrow. The wind sucked the energy out of us. Saturday and Sunday we put out about 750-800 taps and we have a tad less then 200 to go. We had some sap in the buckets but have decided that we will let that freeze instead of running over 350-400 trees to collect a few hundred gallons. My SIL is trying to design a vacuum system with a hose where we don't have to carry the sap so far in the buckets. We will see how that works.

Bryce

Question? Can you boil the sap down till almost done then save it till you boil again to finish a larger batch? It's my third year doing this and just as a hobby.

I've decided not to do syrup again this spring..I do see that my yard tree has been running the last few days. It drips off cracked branches on my drive way. I also see squirrels up there licking sap off them branches.. So I if I was going to tap I would have been doing it probably last Friday - Saturday.

Good luck guys I will be following your progress.

Mac

62 taps and 35 gallon Fri., 70 gal Sat. and 20 gal yesterday should be a couple good days this week. Mike

Scrapper, I don't see why not(within reasonable time). I've done it at different stages of process but I think refrig or freezing it works best. I too am just hobby and if run is start/stop it is nice to get enough to make boiling worth it or fit my schedule. I luckily have large banks of snow from off the roof on the north side of cabin where I can store gerry jugs of raw/partly processed sap till I get enough. Each night those jugs freeze you can drain off concentrated sap(leaving ice in jug to melt out in the sun or inside) and get free reduction of water content. I actually processed my syrup by freezing the sap in 1/2 gl jugs around the inner wall of my trapping freezer in 12 hr cycles, drain out the sap(4 times and it is as concencentrated 75%. and boil from there). It would be nice to have a sugar refractomator to really quantify it but I ran the ice melt from the second and third cycle of one run and it yielded syrup as good as other so I factor this method loses about 10% of possible syrup but saves 75% of boiling fuel(whatever you use) time invested is about the same I have tested and it only loses about 1-2% of sugar in ice each cycle till 4 than really jumps to about 25% and higher after that each cycle as sap is concentrated. Take about 1.5 hrs to boil to finish stage outside on turkey boiler than 45 min inside on the stove to finish(better heat control). Must have good sap as we get about 50 to 1 so 100 g of sap gets us apron 2 g of finished syrup. We are planning a little bigger collection this year as we have ample maple and are going to a small RO system to process a little quicker doing about 500g of sap.

A small liberal arts college near me requires students to perform work to offset tuition. The school raises show quality livestock and does crop and tree research. One student made walnut syrup a few year ago. Another condensed the steam and sold bottled water labeled as “water made from organic sources.”

FDA prohibits labeling water as organic, but water from organic sources was ok.

I want to try their walnut syrup.

My oldest boiled down 15 gallons yesterday (we've got multiple kinds of maples tapped) and we ended up with this. We've been collecting and boiling for about 2 weeks. Small-time operation.

You can bring your sap to a boil to kill the bacteria that causes it to spoil and let it sit for days in a cool location with no problems. Or keep it stored out of the sun as cold as possible or the sugar level will slowly drop. Started off with a few dozen taps a year back in the late 80’s now nearly a 1000 on vacuum that gives me around 10-15,000 gallons of sap each season. One of my favorite hobbies.

How many of you big time sappers finish off your own syrup for use/sale or sell/trade to processors?