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Tap, tap, tap - it’s time for maple syrup
Wild Side column: Warmer weather already has brought first signs of maple syrup season
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About the time you thought you ought to be out tapping maple trees it got too cold to even go outside, let alone for the sap to flow.
During those five days of unrelieved subzero wind chills (Feb. 16 to 21), about all you could do is look out the window and marvel at the disappearance of snow through sublimation.
That bitterly cold week, with its dry air and ample sunlight, provided ideal conditions for snow to transition directly to water vapor without passing through a liquid phase.
You also could look at the long-range weather forecast and wait for Feb. 23, the first day high temperatures were predicted to top the freezing mark.
I don’t pretend to understand all the nuances of sap flow, but I’m pretty sure any substance that’s 98 percent water is not going anywhere when the temperature is 40 degrees cooler than water’s freezing point.
Two days before the predicted warmup, the neighborhood cardinal, without the benefit of weather forecasts, came out of his winter stupor and greeted the lightening eastern sky with his cheerful chee chee chee cheroo.
I took that, the first song I’d heard from him in months, as a favorable omen for the hoped-for great awakening and soon-to-be-forthcoming sap flow.
On the appointed day — Sunday, Feb. 23 — the afternoon temperature climbed into the mid-40s. With glove-free hands, I and my friend Dean Kress of Quasqueton, who introduced me to the pleasures of sapping and cooking syrup, tapped our first tree of the 2025 season.
As Dean removed the drill bit from the first hole, I watched expectantly as a liquid orb, reflecting the world around it, expanded at the spile’s opening and fell to the ground — the season’s first drop of sap.
We tapped 18 more trees, which yielded a combined 9 gallons of sap on Monday’s first collection and 10 gallons on Tuesday’s second collection, all of which came from fewer than half the trees we’d tapped. We needed to do better.
On Tuesday afternoon, I removed the taps from a half dozen as-yet-dry-as-a-bone trees and moved the hardware to trees that leaked sap when the drill bit was removed. On Wednesday morning several gallons of sap in the receptacles on those “new” trees boded well for an improved collection Wednesday afternoon, which occurred after this column was written.
When and under what conditions maple sap will flow is a frequent topic of conversation among my 104,000 fellow members of the Backyard Maple Syrup Maker Facebook group.
I tried to read up on the science behind sap flow but gave up when it all began to sound as definite as the science predicting when fish will bite or morels will pop. That’s the beauty of it, I guess.
In such mysterious matters, I try to go often, stay late, make adjustments and hope I’m there when it happens.
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