So...I have a few maple trees...and I'm a big fan of Maple Syrup, on just about everything...waffles, pancakes, ice cream, in my Chai Tea, and of course, lets not leave out - on a spoon (or in a cup with a straw). Ok...you get the point. Clearly, a great opportunity for us is to tap these vessels of sweet sap to feed my very high calorie habit.
We borrowed some pails and taps from a friend, in return for some finished product I'd expect...and we washed them up, along with the cleaning a of a rain barrel and a few large ice cream tubs from the local dairy that we'll be using to store the sap until we get to the boiling stage.
I just thought I'd give you a little glimpse into our little operation, and keep you posted as to our progress. I hesitate to give you any real instruction because this is new to us...so I recommend YouTube for detailed steps or getting in touch with a local Sugar Bush operations, whom I'm sure would be more than happy to help. We have some elevation here and could have used lines that feed into pails, but we were trying to keep our costs at a minimum this year. Perhaps we'll keep that in mind for next year depending on how this goes.
We set up 7 pails and I think we'll manage a couple more in the next couple days, once I identify a couple more maple trees. We drilled the holes, used a hammer to put in the taps then we set the pails on the hooks and voila! In no time we became a small scale, home use only, maple syrup producer. I am, to say the least, very excited and pretty pumped about our progress. 
We started to see a couple of the trees run right away, which was very encouraging for the kids. This should be a pretty interesting time for us. It will be very fun to go on the tour of our local sugar bushes this year, and have a better appreciation for what they do.
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