Maple sap is running early this year?

Hi all,

Usually here in Western PA (Zone 6) we don't tap our maple trees till the 1st week of February.  I looked at the 10 day forecast for early January after we had the polar vortex/bomb cyclone and was like "it's too early but it looks like sugaring weather."  Sure enough, when I tapped a tree yesterday, they were running strongly.  I'm guessing it's the same for others, so I wanted to share.

In this age of climate change, I think the times are going to have to be more flexible.  I'm glad I didn't have it in my head that I had to wait for Feb 1st (as I have done the previous 12 years!)

We have 9 sugar maples tapped this year, which is enough usually for a gallon of syrup.  We wood fire it on our own boil system- - I have info for how we built it on my blog: https://thedruidsgarden.com/2022/01/23/building-a-rocket-stove-maple-sap-boiler-for-maple-sugarin/

Anyone else seeing a really early run on the sugar maples or other sugar-producing trees?

Up here in NH (5a) winter seems to just be starting (about a month late)... we don't tap until March, so we'll see as we get closer. I have to wonder what the weather you're getting will do to the trees, especially if it get's colder again....

Thank you for sharing your blog post - that's perhaps the most comprehensive and accessible guide I've seen. I'd like to try out that setup when I get the chance.

Excellent blog post Dana!

One thing I noticed in the first picture is that you might have a tapping problem (if those are your trees).  Notice how the bark is wet under each of the taps below the buckets?  That means you're losing some sap down the side of the tree instead of into your bucket.  Sometimes that's from pounding metal taps too hard into the tree and they actually split the tree as it freezes and thaws.  Other times is from drilling slightly imperfectly cylindrical holes (not keeping drill perfectly straight as you drill).  I'm guessing there could be other causes too.

Wow, I really love your boiler!  I have always worked with the commercial kind, but I am curious to use your system when I settle down myself. Thanks for sharing!

Up here in Quebec, we might have to wait a bit still, but I'll keep an eye out for an early season thanks to you! A beekeeper from Ontario also said bees were expecting a shorter winter this year as they didn't stock up a lot food for their offsprings last fall. That being said, as Ian, the winter here seems to only just begin... We'll see!

Mike: Thanks so much.  We actually had the wrong drill bit that year, so we had some dripping. But we've solved that problem this year!  

We've already gotten about 15 gallons in only a few days with 9 trees.  

We had a small flow two weeks ago, and are looking to have another here over the weekend.  Nothing big, but it was still sweet.

We’re having erratic but decent flow of walnut sap here in mid Missouri. My kids tap, boil and we all enjoy the syrup as much as maple, which doesn’t occur on our land

I expect our temps in Southen Indiana to jump around like a college kid at a football game. Its my first year tapping my own trees, and I've only done this is Northern Wisconsin before, where it didnt usually fluctuate enough to make it hard to decide.
Would it bad to tap them now and leave the tap open for a few weeks while it runs and stops and runs and stops?

Tom! I'm about to tap some walnuts for the first time ever. Is there anything different from Maple tapping that I should know about?

Here in the Pacific Northwest, our maple tapping season often starts in November. Basically, once the leaves have fallen off the maples and before buds have formed--and when temperatures are below freezing at night and above freezing during the day--sap can flow.

Our maple season is often over by February, if not earlier. Some years are just too warm and the sap doesn't flow. If it's freezing at night and above freezing during the day, why not try a tap or two to see what happens! Some years we have a warm November/December, and we have no sap then, but have sap later on. It really depends!

I attached a study done back in the 70's on Big Leaf Maples in Oregon. I had to search the Wayback machine for it, because it was no longer available on it's original site. Here's a handy quote from it:

Experience with eastern sugar maple has shown that sap flow is correlated with cool nights when temperatures drop to 34º F. or lower, followed by warming conditions up to 40º to 50º F. the next day. The eastern sugar bush has a continental climate with prolonged periods of freezing weather, and sap flow is delayed until warming trends occur in the spring. Our study area has a mild climate with frequent warm days. Sugar weather depends on occurrence of cold nights, which may occur almost anytime during the winter

Katherine Pettus wrote:Tom! I'm about to tap some walnuts for the first time ever. Is there anything different from Maple tapping that I should know about?

I'm a newbie at tapping my black walnut trees, and have never tapped maples, but I understand that you get less volume of sap from walnut trees than from maples.  The actual tapping is the same though.

I dump my collected sap (from three trees) into a large stock pot and slow-simmer it on top of my soapstone woodstove.  It humidifies the room and slowly reduces the sap to perfect syrup.  The finished syrup will taste like maple syrup but with a hint of butterscotch.  Ours lasted most of a year in the fridge before we used it up.  

Since our red oaks are all dying of the wilt, I'm looking at replacing them with sugar maples, adding one here and there, every year. [and I'd like to plant white oaks too that are less susceptible to oak wilt- looking for white oak acorns!]
The switch is all the more tempting that all these dead oaks will produce lots of BTUs to cook the maple sap. [I will just have to shelter the dead wood in the meantime]
I came across this interesting article dealing more specifically with Wisconsin, where I live. Lots of good information here:
https://www.wisfarmer.com/story/life/food/2018/11/15/maple-syrup-production-has-long-history-wisconsin/1944956002/
They are noticing that the season is more random, starting and stopping...
Technically, the maple season is when we have temperatures above freezing during the day and freezing temperatures at night [like we have now, in mid January, which is very odd]: The "usual" season runs from sometimes in March and ending in April. Typically, all is over by Easter.
In Wisconsin we usually have a "mid January thaw". It is pretty much expected every year and I've been living in WI since 1970. So are we having our mid January thaw? If we do, it seems to be extremely long lasting. It has been abnormally warm all Fall and now winter...
Independently of when to start tapping, as we say in French: "The prettiest girl in the world can only give what she's got". If we were to start tapping right now because the sap is running, what kind of a *growing* season would we have? As humans, we tend to take, take, take but are not so willing to give. An extremely long season might mean a weakened tree, like if you take too much blood out of a person. I am extrapolating here, and while this is logical, I do not know if it is correct. Folks will assure me that with one spigot on the South side, the tree loses only a tiny fraction of the sap it makes. That is true too.
The overall snow amounts we get over the winter will melt, regenerating more sap: low snowfall could mean less sap [but perhaps more concentrated?]. Some of our largest snowfalls are often in March. I'm afraid our sugar maple syrup producers might have to roll the dice: Tap early as the sap is running or go by the calendar?

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:If we were to start tapping right now because the sap is running, what kind of a *growing* season would we have? As humans, we tend to take, take, take but are not so willing to give. An extremely long season might mean a weakened tree, like if you take too much blood out of a person. I am extrapolating here, and while this is logical, I do not know if it is correct. Folks will assure me that with one spigot on the South side, the tree loses only a tiny fraction of the sap it makes. That is true too.

I was thinking along these same lines.  But as a relative newcomer to tapping trees I assumed other more experienced folks felt this would be OK.  Glad you mentioned it as now perhaps someone knowledgeable will chime in with words of wisdom!

One thing to keep in mind is that sap doesn't run continuously for month after month. It's a tree response to the beginning of spring. But if you tap early in the run the tree will begin at some point to heal the holes and the sap will diminish. And if you tap midseason this will happen and if you tap late it will happen. Sometimes folks who tap early will pull spiles and retap the trees to keep the sap flowing bit I don't think you could do that more than once. So you end up having to go with your preference. Also the more stop and go in the flow makes the holes you tapped heal over. So that's a big drawback in tapping super early compared to waiting till spring is actually coming, n o t just a winter thaw. My experience is in north Michigan. So that's my framework. I tend to tap later. My land is in a valley so the snow and cold lingers longer than it does up on the hills nearby. Those neighbors tend to tap sooner and pull their taps earlier.

These are good questions.  A few years ago we had weather like this in mid Jan and then we didn't tap.  We ended up with only a week of flow because the temperatures got consistently too warm.  I think with climate change, we have to be more flexible in terms of tapping.   I will pull these taps regardless once we hit 40 gallons, cause we aim to make one gallon of sap each year.

In terms of tapping walnuts, the ratio is higher but the process is the same. A friend of mine had many black walnuts, I tapped my trees for maple sap, she tapped for walnuts.  We boiled down the sap on the same day...they tasted identical.  We were expecting some difference.  Walnuts flow at the same time as maples, pretty much.

We tapped the 4 of February 2023.  We are getting slow flows do to no sun.  We have enough to start boiling.  Here is from last night.

Christopher Shepherd wrote:We tapped the 4 of February 2023.  We are getting slow flows do to no sun.  We have enough to start boiling.  Here is from last night.

Chris, I liked the sump pump system in the first vid. Do you think that if placed above the boiling pan it would be possible to feed the boiling pan by gravity whenever the sap is just about cooked down?
Also, if the weather is too foul to cook sap, you would still be able to store the sap until the time is right.
I also loved the screen on which you spray the water to be boiled. It looked like you could remove a fair amount of debris.
Cool set up!

I just started tapping 2 days ago and they were immediately dripping. I probably could have started a week or 2 earlier.

Thank you Cécile.  We have plans to put a tank above the sugar shack some day.  It will take a considerable structure to do what I want to.  For now we use food grade barrels to store and keep the small preheat tank full by bucketing it there.  The screen was my sons idea.  We screen it going into the barrels too. Over the years we slowly get better.  I like making little videos, because people that want to learn pick up all the details and give us great feedback.

Trees are still running strong here, 1 month after I tapped them.  We will be doing our first wood-fired boil this weekend.  

Hi Dana, where are you from?

Walnut sap running strong here in Missouri. I’m trying to get my kid to stop harvest but he wants to keep going. I suspect he wants to be a walnut syrup magnate! At least he’s trying for a very tasty gallon of syrup.

Christopher Shepherd wrote:Hi Dana, where are you from?

Western Pennsylvania, USA ( Indiana County, 1300 feet - I list the elevation because it matters quite a bit in the mountains) :).

Just an update.  The taps stopped flowing exactly 1 month after we tapped them.  We ended up with 65 gallons of sap from 9 trees, which was a great haul and a bit more than a usual season.  We did two big boils and now have about a gallon and a half of delicious syrup.  Best of luck with your sugaring, everyone!

Hi Dana,
Nice write up, sounds like you had a great season! We are too far north for maple trees, but tap our birches, which requires closer to 100 gallons of sap per gallon of syrup. We are about to start tapping any day now.
A couple thoughts on your concrete block evaporator setup, as that's a fairly common design many of us 'non-commercial' producers use. To get more heat from less wood, and have even more 'rocket' action, 1) a steel or brick/block baffle, the width of the heater (21") and maybe 6" less than the height to the bottom of the pans, in front of the elbow leading to the stovepipe will force the exhaust to go around, instead of directly out, and the longer path will cause more heat to be extracted. It also eliminates the issue of ashes getting into or blocking the elbow. 2) the blocks on the sides are acting like chimneys that draw heated air up and out. If you filled the voids with vermiculite (or even gravel) you'd insulate the firebox and keep the heat siphon from happening. 3) I would think a lot of heat is also lost on the end where the wood is fed in to the fire. A removable metal panel there that closes up maybe 80% of the opening would create a stronger draft to the fire and act as a one way valve to keep more heat in.
Since we need to boil 100 gallons of sap down to get 1 gallon of syrup (and try to make at least 3) we are always scheming of ways to reduce the amount of wood needed to fire the evaporator, because it's a LOT! Our boiler system is an old 100 gallon water heater shell modified into a 5' long wood stove. It sits horizontally in a brick 'cradle'. The fire is built at one end and the heat travels the length of it to the chimney. It has a mechanical draft and damper, but is mostly run wide open. Unfortunately steel can't be insulated too much on the outside or it overheats and warps, so we lose a fair bit to radiation out the bottom and sides. I'm wondering if the concrete block setup might be more efficient.

This may be crazy, but has anybody tried freezing as a zero-energy "first boil" for maple or especially birch sap?

As in, it's warm during the day but drops below freezing at night. Skim the ice off the top, and repeat?

We do freeze it, supposedly that was a trick indigenous people used. But with birch sap, the sugar content is so low it will all easily freeze, so we aren't sure if we gain much by doing that. We also thaw the ice layer to drink- and actually bottle many gallons of sap to drink too- because it's delicious, like the purest water imaginable! Supposedly healthy as well, due to trace minerals. I've even seen squirrels biting the branches to get sap to drip and then drinking it.
What really works well, that the commercial producers all use, is a reverse osmosis machine, but those are expensive because you want the stuff that is filtered out, and the cheap units have sealed disposable filters.

Yeah, we can freeze it.  Sometimes you can freeze as much as 50-70% of what you would boil to cut down on boiling time.  The trick of this is that if you do it that way, you have to boil right away.  For us, we are usually doing 1-2 boil days, so if we pull the ice off too early and then let it sit anotuerh week or two, it ferments.  So it is a delicate balance!