Backyard Sugaring (For Beginners)

Maple, Birch, Walnut and More!

Vermont is famous for maple syrup, producing more than double the gallons compared to any other state. While there are major producers, much of the syrup comes from small-scale and backyard sugaring operations.

This time of year, friends and family gather around the sugar shack to eat traditional maple taffy (sugar on snow) that’s made by pouring piping hot maple syrup on cold snow so that it quickly forms into a sweet sticky taffy. It’s always served with a rich, but barely sweet sugarhouse donut and a homemade pickle (to cut the sweetness).

We make around 6 to 8 gallons of maple syrup each year, which is more than enough to satisfy our needs and share with neighbors and friends. We use it in our cooking throughout the year in place of sugar, and it adds flavor as well as sweetness.

Since our chickens are laying heavily right now, I’m making maple pots de creme (custard, similar to creme brulee, but without the blow torch). And there will be plenty of maple pumpkin pies with what’s left of our storage squash, and maple banana bread for the kids. We also use it in our canning recipes, like in this maple whiskey pear butter.

Making maple syrup is pretty simple, and is just two steps:

1. Tap the trees to collect sap

2. Boil the sap until it turns into syrup

That’s it.

Cooking down maple sap in an improvised 55-gallon drum evaporator (made by Vermont Evaporator Company). It’s a great solution if you don’t have a permanent sugar house, as it can be easily carried out to the driveway, set up, and operated by a single person.

If you want it to keep, canning maple syrup will keep it shelf stable indefinitely. Yes, literally for decades.

With a bit more processing, you can make maple sugar, cream, and candy.

While fancy equipment helps, it’s not really necessary. There are plenty of ways to create an improvised sugaring set up, with things you already may have on hand (like cinder blocks).

The only thing you really need is maple taps, which are just a buck or two a piece. (Or, if you want to go crazy, you can craft your own out of a plant with a soft pith in the center of the branches, like elderberry or staghorn sumac.)

A maple tap I made from an elderberry branch. Not as sleek as a modern metal one, but it does get the job done, and it’s the way maple trees were tapped for hundreds of years.

Sap tastes sweet and maple-y, but it’s only about 2-3% sugar when it comes out of the tree. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of syrup, so it’s not something you want to cook down indoors. (All that steam is a recipe for a mold problem in your house.)

Even if you’re not set up to boil sap into syrup, there are still plenty of ways to use maple sap (which is easy enough to collect).

If you’re just collecting a small amount of sap for fresh use, you can literally trim off the tips of a low-hanging maple branch and tie on an old bottle to collect the sap. It will run just like that, no tap required.

A single tree will produce as much as 10 gallons of sap in a season (which will make about a quart of syrup if boiled down).

A few hours worth of sap run on a nice sunny day is enough to cause your buckets to overflow!

If you don’t have maple trees, no worries!

There are literally dozens of other trees you can tap for syrup, including birch, beech, ironwood, walnut, butternut, and many more.

We tap ironwood trees for a spicy syrup that tastes a bit like it has cinnamon and cardamom in it. Beech syrup tastes like butterscotch, and birch syrup is spicy with just a hint of bitterness that goes really well in savory recipes.

Tapping birch for syrup

Things You Might Need This Week

• The Best of Practical Self Reliance ~ At this point, there are more than 700 articles on practical self-reliance…and it can be a lot to sort through. I created a quick article index with all the most popular articles in one place.

• How to Grow Honeyberries ~ The very first berries of the season, honeyberries ripen about two weeks before the first early strawberries. They’re easy to grow, and they taste like a cross between a blueberry and a grape. Bonus, they’re related to honeysuckle, and the bees love their sweet, fragrant early flowers right as the snow melts.

My daughter holding honeyberry fruit from our garden.

Seasonal Preserving

Recipes to keep your larder full all year round…in season now:

• 50+ Fruit Canning Recipes ~ Fresh fruit will be in season before you know it. Make a plan now with these recipes, organized by fruit type.

• It’s the tail end of citrus season, but we still see plenty of fresh grapefruit, tangerines, and luscious blood oranges at the market. There are also plenty of fresh lemons, and they’re on sale because it’s the last of the main crop. I take this opportunity to put up a summer’s worth of lemonade concentrate, as well as strawberry lemonade concentrate with the first spring berries.

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Things I’m Loving

• Greta from Love Off Grid wrote a really thoughtful piece titled “Bug Out or All In” where she talks through her preparedness journey and her decision to start homesteading (leaving a well-paying job in the city). It’s well-written, and it really spoke to me this week. I hope y’all enjoy it.

What are you harvesting, preserving, building, or exploring on your homestead this week? I’d love to hear about it!

Leave me a note in the comments…

(Comments only, please. Emails tend to get lost in my inbox, and as much as I’d love to get back to each and every one, my screen time is very limited…and things fall through the cracks, and emails get buried in my inbox. If you comment here, they’re all in one place, and it’s much easier to get back to every single one.)

Until Next Time,

Ashley at Practical Self Reliance