all about the glorious maple tree

I would just like to start a catch all thread to talk about all of the things we currently know about maple trees.

And to start this off, I would like to offer this video I just uploaded featuring skeeter making a few comments about maple.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJzmdezUl1U

BTW: When you like a youtube video, please encourage the author by: clicking on the fifth star (ratings), the little heart (favorites) and writing a text comment.

Thanks!

Acer macrophyllum - great leaf producer for mulch, big leaves smother grasses well - easy to grow from seed, creates a dry zone around it by sucking up lots of water, stump sprouts so good for coppice, young stems are pithy so good for straws, older wood burns nice.

Acer circinatum - slow growing from seed, competes poorly with grasses, fussy about where it grows.

Sugar maple: for syrup!

I remember St. Lawrence nurseries sold "sweet sap silver maple" as a replacement for syrup. The tree can be tapped in nine years instead of the traditional 30. And the sap was 2.5 times more concentrated - so less time spent evaporating.

Japanese maple does OK in a mediterranean climate.

Today I saw a maple (I think) trained in sort of a creeping form: a crotch about a foot off the ground, those two branches arcing down to about half that height, and all growth lateral from there. Odd, but pretty, and it didn't look unnatural.

I'm told folks on Vancouver Island have been using A. macrophyllum sap to make syrup for the last fifteen years or so. clearly hasn't been done on a large scale yet as I've yet to see big leaf syrup for sale any place, but I'm told it compares well to sugar maple.

large big leaf maples are great for imparting a very nice greenish hue to afternoon sunlight filtering through them. good for tree houses, too.

I've got a decades long project started growing a covered walkway out of vine maples (A. circinatum).

flowers are good early season pollen source for critters that like that sort of thing.

I like Douglas maples (A. glabrum var. douglasii), though I don't know much about them. rare in my area, so it's a treat to see them.

maple wood is used for musical instruments. also bowling pins, butcher blocks and other things that need to be hard. sometimes gets some weird figures, which woodworkers like: birdseye, etc. it also gets spalted by fungus, which woodworkers also like.

its worth looking up maples and sap flow to know more about trees because as maple syrup is a crop its sap flow is well studied and illuminating. rose.

We have just gotten done with our tenth season of maple sugaring on our land here in Central Maine. It was a short but sweet season and we had a lot of fun.

Here's a youtube video we made about our maple operation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISbkO-NKA9o

I think of maple sugaring as a kind of permaculture.

We have the two kinds of trees we tap around here, the sugar and the red maple.

I like the way that the red maples flower in the spring.

Sugars are the classic sugarmakers tree. Grey furrowed bark, crowns 50 or 100 feet up in the sky, catching the sun on rocky hillsides.

What's not to like about maples?

Welcome aboard, Revi.

Nice video!

Any flavor difference between red maple and sugar maple?

Are you in the video?

I think you should start threads here for some of your other videos.

Thanks, I'll post some of our other videos. I am the guy who has the sugar shack, with my friend John.

It's been a fun thing to do for us. We get wood for our home fires and John's wife makes jams and jellies out of the syrup. It's a farm that works for our lifestyle.

Sugaring is a really fun adventure you can have in your own backyard.

I can't tell the difference between the syrup made from red maples and sugars, but I think if you just had one or the other you could tell the difference.

There are a number of trees you can use to make maple syrup, including the Norway maple, the box elder and the silver maple.

Un-boiled sap was traditionally very important. I bet some of the ways it's currently used involve boiling it down and then re-diluting it, which probably makes sense for storage, but less so while it's in season.

I bet coffee or tea made from maple water would be excellent.

Joel Hollingsworth, I read about maple syrup when i was trying to find out more about sap flow and maple sap as it is when it comes out of the tree only contains two percent sugar if i remember right and you have to boil it up quick to reduce it because it is like milk very inclined to go off , so i suppoes the quantity of sugar in it has to do with getting it concetrated enough to preserve itself like jam does. Part of the price of maple sugar is in all the reducing you have to do to turn it into syrup all the wood htat gets used.
I should think there are those that water it down as you say but they would not be able to do so much. Agri rose macaskie.

Revi,

I wonder if the rocket stove designs would be of any help in your boilers. Have you looked into that at all?

Didn't see the source talking about removal of water through freezing... so:

"The process of making maple syrup is an age-old tradition of the North American Indians, who used it both as a food and as a medicine. They would make incisions into trees with their tomohawks and use birch barks to collect the sap. The sap would be condensed into syrup by evaporating the excess water using one of two methods: plunging hot stones into the sap or the nightly freezing of the sap, following by the morning removal of the frozen water layer. "

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=115

I wonder if there's anybody doing that to any effect.

Reducing things so the water to lessen their water content by freezing them and taking off the layer of ice in the morning hum it is interesting. agri rose macaskie.

chuck in the forum he started the versatile birch,says that he and his freinds dont reduce birch sap they don't much like it concentrated, birch can be used in the same way maple is used it is milked from the trees and the sap can be boiled down for sugar in laura ingals wilder it is boiled down to sugar consitency or syrup, birch sap is used to make wine in scotland and i think some scandinavian places. chuck says they tap it to just drink it as it comes from the tree and they use it for coffee and chocolate drinks, they really fill themselves full of it. So not everyone turns it into srup, some use it more like fruit juice,or drinks base. agri rose macaskie.

I have friends who keep the sap to make ice cubes for their drinks in the summer.

I think you can use the sap as a sweetener in anything,but the reason to boil it down to 66 brix is that it will keep, but it hasn't crystallized into maple sugar.

I was thinking of using a rocket stove design to finish the syrup off and heat the sugarhouse at the same time. The evaporator isn't designed to heat the place, just boil off lots of sap. The person stoking the arch is the only one really warm. That's why we call it the hot seat.

Sugaring is really fun. It's an obsession.

What a great video Revi.

I want to have liquid sap for making raw smoothie drinks for our family. So I am planting about 10 - two inch high big leaf maple seedlings in pots to grown them big enough to plant in our hedgerows in coastal British Columbia. Just guessing it will be ten years before we get any sap. Well you have to start somewhere...