Every year we have to tap our trees with a fresh tap hole and every year we ‘pull’ or remove the spouts at the end of the season. Tapping marks the beginning of the maple season. We need to drill a fresh hole every year because throughout the season the trees will essentially heal over the wounds we’ve drilled. Maple trees have the ability to ‘compartmentalize’ damage. It's a process that likely evolved as a defense mechanism to protect the tree from wounds and infection. Throughout the spring, the maple tree will wall off or compartmentalize the area around the taphole. This creates non-conductive wood or xylem, essentially scar tissue where no liquid and gas can travel through. Consequently, we don’t tap the same hole more than once. We move taps annually around the trunk of the tree to avoid hitting the damage of old tap holes. Some producers might re-ream the hole mid-season if they feel like the tap holes are healing up or ‘drying out’. We don’t do this on our farm. It’s not allowed under organic certification because it is generally harder on the trees. We’re also required to remove our spouts promptly after the season. So, we don’t leave our taps in the trees until the following year. After our last boil, we return to the woods and pull out our spouts. The sooner we remove the spouts, the longer the tree has to heal up the tap hole wound.

Maple trees have two characteristics that make them able to tap: compartmentalization and a high density xylem. Traditionally in North America, maple trees, specifically the sugar maple, have been the primary species to tap because it tends to produce the sweetest sap and the most sap. Red maple trees are also commonly tapped to make syrup. Beyond maples, you can tap other types of trees to make other types of syrups. Birch trees are often tapped to make birch syrup. The sap from a birch tree is half as sweet on average which means it can take twice as much sap to make the same amount of syrup. 

It depends! In a typical season, it takes 3-4 weeks to tap all of our trees here. We tend to begin tapping our trees earlier and earlier in the calendar year. Partially because of climate change and partially because of the amount of trees we tap. If we begin tapping trees in January we’re generally ready to gather, process, and boil our sap by February. If there's more snow, it takes a lot longer. Some days we are on snowshoes in waist deep snow, other times we’re cruisin’ on bare ground! 

Since we’re certified organic we have tapping guidelines in our woods that are annually inspected. The organic guidelines tend to be more conservative than the rules that the State of Vermont puts out for its current use program. We adhere to both. We won’t tap a tree until it's at least 12 inches in diameter at breast height. Diameter at breast height or DBH is a standard forestry tool for approximating a tree’s age.