Just finishing our 5th season of hobby sugaring and we are seeing a distinct sooner, longer sap season from our lowly river bottom trees than highland ones. Approx 4 times more sap from bottoms from similar trees. Is this typical? It is a week or more delayed from hi trees which greatly shortens season before busting temp end it. We have GPS mapped 250+ mature sugar maple on our acerage but only 75 are in the river bottom. Fortunately they put out the couple of hundred gallons of sap we wish to process each year(1 tap per tree). Just interested in the sap potential of all our trees. My thoughts are the lowland trees roots thaw earlier.

What percent sugar are you getting from the lower trees versus the higher trees?

That is a very good question. I was getting a much higher percentage than I was supposed to all of the time. Most of my trees were lowland ones, both maple proper and box elder. I think, to be honest, that the lowland ones have an easier time getting water because they were along the water and in being in those locations, they only had to shoot a root or two below the water line and they had all of the water they could ever use. This to me seems to make them faster growing and capable of processing much more sugar. I also wonder though, if that increased growth comes at a price. Is the tree producing wood that is as strong as the slower growing upland trees?

I get a much higher sugar content in the high land trees and a earlier run but that is because my high land is south facing slope that warms up sooner. This season has not been good volume wise but 2.5% sugar is slightly better than average for me so far. I am only at 8 gallons of sap per tap so far this season with about a week to go yet.
Slower growing trees are usually stronger because the growth rings are tighter.

There may have been less frozen ground in the lower trees. We had an open winter and had almost no sap running all of March this year. Due to drier conditions we had better sugar content this year than last year. We got about 25% less sap then our 5 year average but about 15% less syrup. We also note that it was windy this year and the higher ground trees catch a lot more wind and that coos thing off for those smaller branches and twigs.
We had one woods that we got 1600 gals. of sap from and that was over 3%.
We got 85% of our sap from April 1st to the 12th. The whole month of March was very poor for us.

Bryce