Eating Maple Leaves?

Im currently shopping for seeds, and one of the species that has piqued my interest is Maple.  Specifically the Sugar Maple - Acer saccharum for the very long term goal of leaving behind trees that a future generation can potentially tap into for the sweet deliciousness.  

Im reading that it can take 30-40 years, so this won't likely be for my own benefit.  Unless maybe any of you have leads on other species that could be used as alternatives?  

Paul Wheaton did post about this topic 13 years ago...  https://permies.com/t/3523/woodland/glorious-maple-tree

Quote from Paul

I remember St. Lawrence nurseries sold "sweet sap silver maple" as a replacement for syrup.  The tree can be tapped in nine years instead of the traditional 30.  And the sap was 2.5 times more concentrated - so less time spent evaporating.

What species is this?  

Aaand...The Leaves !  They are edible?!  This id love to try.  

With so many species of Maple out there - there has to be a few that produce better quality leafy greens than others.  

Which ones might be better, or best?  

Im not getting much luck finding the answers with the google gods, so I figured Id post the question here.  

Anybody here have experience with the culinary delights of Maple greens?  

Maple nuts are also of interest.  Although small, they are supposedly tasty.  Im wondering which species might be most suitable to begin a breeding project with for Nuts.  

We eat big leaf maple flower buds.  They are great for snacking on the trail.  But once they are old enough to produce pollen, they tend to be hard to digest and can cause cramping and a strong urge to sit in a bush if we eat too many.

The young buds are very nutritious and filling.   A bit like bread and cheese (hawthorn shots).  A good hunger gap food.

Not sure about other maple leaves.  Be fun to try.   Also, maybe different ways of preparing them influence how easy they are to digest?

Also the syrup from big leaf maples tastes like it already has butter in it.  Amazing!  But we don't have good weather for syruping most years.   Maybe once every 14 year.

There is a couple in Wisconsin who are developing a way to plant maples and start making syrup in year five

They plant them super thick.  

At year five they go in an cut the tops off some of the trees and connect a a vacuum pump to them and suck the sap out of them.  At the end of the season those trees are cut off at ground level and the process is repeated each year for the next several years.

Once the trees are about 8 inches in diameter some of them are tapped for a few years than cut down.  As the trees get bigger they get tapped for more years then cut down.  Eventually the trees are thinned out through tapping and cutting and you end up with a woods full of trees large enough to tap that have never been tapped before.

The idea behind the method it a person can plant a sugarbush and be able to start making money off it in only a couple years instead of having to wait 20-40 years before getting any production.

I think Proctor maple research center in Vermont has a similar experiment going.

I made silver maple syrup and sugar last year, and it was delicious. I used a bowl, removed the ice each morning and added it to the pot. The resulting syrup was lighter in color and had a different, more delicate, floral flavor than the regular maple syrup. I’m guessing the species had something to do with it, but probably the ice removal method had some part as well. Norway maple didn’t have appreciable sap, though they have numerous seeds that the squirrels adore. I have tried some raw when they were immature, and they were tasty but would be better soaked/washed like quinoa to remove the saponins. It is hard to find low hanging branches though. I also have tried striped and Norway maple leaves, but they were horrendous.

Whether we eat them or not, the leaves are nutritious for soil dwellers such as earthworms, and make a very good mulch, so there are already benefits from the beginning. Underneath them will grow many edible and medicinal woodland herbs. Here these include ramps (Allium tricoccum), but in your area of the world ramsons/bear garlic (Allium ursinum) are a similar native species that might like the conditions.

Something sounds a little off about the tree topping dense planting method, some whiff of field-grown ginseng or conifer monoculture plantation, and am doubtful about the possibility of causing a healthy forest to grow by that method, but time will tell. I believe from observation that mature forests (such as those where sugar maple prefers to grow) need a large variety of trees, both broadleaf and conifer (even if it’s mostly one or the other) in order to develop properly with healthy soils and soil life. Although conifer trees seem especially important because of their mycorrhizal connections holding the soil and making it develop well.

Maple syrup quality varies a lot simply by the weather. So, not sure if it’s the species that had the effect.

Last year I had dark strong flavored syrup the first week from a tree, then clear syrup the next week, and then medium colored 🤷🏼‍♂️

Very odd.

My guess was that if springtails get in your sap then it makes it dark, and if ants get in your sap it makes it lite 🤣

Since I am not Bessie the Cow, with a ruminant digestive system, I personally would not be inclined to eat a lot of tree leaves. I suppose I could make a light tea and carefully test the results. But plants have a lot of chemical defence mechanisms, and some of them might not agree with me at all. My 2c.

I've made maple syrup from silver maple sap a few times.  It takes about a third more sap to get to the same sweetness but better than waiting 20 years for sugar Maples to grow.  There is some satisfaction in having the syrup under your belt when you're cleaning up the the mess of helicopters and limbs dropped by these huge trees.Time to tap is now in the Midwestern states.

While I did try to eat maple seeds (Norway maple) in the past, I'd be very, very reluctant to eat any part of a maple tree again (other than sap or syrup). At least some species of maple, like some other plants in the Sapindaceae, contain a toxin called hypoglycin A, which leads to a condition known as Jamaican vomiting sickness. See here and here. While some maple species might be safe or contain very small quantities of the toxin, I'd personally avoid all of them to be on the safe side.

I've never tried eating the leaves, but the seeds of my Norway maple are very tasty. I understand why the squirrels go wild for them.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Since I am not Bessie the Cow, with a ruminant digestive system, I personally would not be inclined to eat a lot of tree leaves. I suppose I could make a light tea and carefully test the results. But plants have a lot of chemical defence mechanisms, and some of them might not agree with me at all. My 2c.

I don't know about other parts of the world, but tradition in England and the Pacific Coast of North America, most tree leaves that are eaten are young, before they get too much light.

bread and cheese is the most famous in England.  On the Left Coast here, the big leaf maple had the most nutrition for the effort so it was the most common.  But, once the buds open enough to produce pollen, it's not easy to digest any more.  

r ranson wrote:I don't know about other parts of the world, but tradition in England and the Pacific Coast of North America, most tree leaves that are eaten are young, before they get too much light.

Interesting! I wasn't aware of that -- I was thinking of mature leaves. Young leaves would be considerably more tender/digestible and probably provided an early season vitamin boost in the past.

Since you have the goal of leaving tappable trees for future generations, it's worth mentioning there are other woodland trees that you can tap for making syrup. Trees like Sycamore, Walnut, Beech, and Birch can all be tapped with various levels of success. I have also heard of Linden and Hop Hornbeam. I have personally tried Black Walnut Syrup, Maple/Beech, and Birch and found them all to be delicious in different ways!

The big differentiating factor is the sugar content in the sap, the gold standard of 40:1 (On a good day) for Sugar Maple is going to be much higher for other species but not all. There's a lot of wiggle room and room for improvement, but it may help you in your search. Finding an existing woodland with tappable trees is much easier when you expand the search parameters beyond just maple.

To be clear, Birch syrup is very different from Maple syrup. It is closer to molasses in color and flavor, with tangy and fruit notes. Not something you use for pancakes, but more for glazes and sauces. Besides having different sugar makeups (Mostly fructose and glucose compared to maple's sucrose), the big difference is the sugar content. Birch is closer to 100-120 gallons sap for 1 gallon of syrup so there is substantially more non-enzymatic browning occurring during boiling. I only bring this up to say if you want a milder syrup from trees with lower sugar content in the sap, try to use fractional freezing and/or reverse osmosis to remove some water without applying heat.

I hope this helps,
Eric S>

There is a method of tapping which you can do on younger trees and causes less injury to the tree. Instead of drilling into the trunk, you break off the end of twigs and feed the broken end into a bottle. I've blogged about it here
http://www.judyofthewoods.net/forage/tree_sap.html
As for eating maple leaves leaves, you could make leaf curd from them, aka leafu or leaf protein. It is said that this method will coagulate the protein out of the juice and leaves toxins behind. No guarantee, mind. Best to try small amounts first. It does take quite a lot of leaves to make a small amount of the stuff, and requires some way of macerating all those leaves. To give you an idea, I tried it with a laundry basket (about a bushel) of nettles which are high in protein, and got about 1/2 cup of soft goop from it. But it was quite tasty, like cooked spinach.

Incredible Seeds offers sugar maple seeds, but being a Canadian source, I don't know whether they would ship overseas.  

Syrup can be made from a variety of hardwood species.  Locally, there is birch syrup production and there is a small community south of here that taps the Manitoba maples (aka box elder) in the town (some 200 or so trees) and makes a limited quantity of syrup - they sell out every year.

It is nice to hear of someone planting for the future rather than looking at looking for instant results.  Good luck.

The big leaf maple are perfect for snacking on right now.



Personally, I ignore the leaf buds because they are too small and don't taste as good as the flowers.



The outer shell of the bud is tough.  Don't want to eat that part



This one's pretty small but also the smaller they are, the less like pollen they taste.  This tasted like sweet hazelnuts.  



We can eat them after they open, but pollen, so I don't.  

These are great for snacking, but I wouldn't want to eat more than a handful a day.