Lindsey and Harvey bought maple syruping supplies at McGough’s in Traverse City. After reading a few articles and watching a YouTube video, we went out and started drilling holes in trees. We found two with running sap, placed our spiles and hung our bags. Now we wait and see what we get. The next adventure will be boiling it down.
Update, Saturday, March 14:
We bought an old metal pot from Walt & Susan’s Antiques on Old Mission Peninsula, and then built a roaring fire in the metal pit on our back deck. This all began about 5:30pm. Reducing the 1.5 gallons of sap to about a 1/3 cup of syrup took almost six hours. I finished up around 11pm by filtering the embers out of the syrup via a coffee filter. It was satisfying to end up with what we set out for. Here are some pictures.
(The adventure begins.)
(Reading Scotland’s Gift: How America Discovered Golf, by C.B. Macdonald to pass the time.)
(11pm-ish . . . when I determined it had reached 219 degrees, seven degrees above water’s boiling point.)
(The end product. It’s sweet, and mable syrup like!)