The Elusive Sugar Maple

This afternoon we spent a few hours tromping through the woods, in search of the elusive Sugar Maple. You'd think in a 90-acre parcel of land that we'd be able to find quite a few, but sadly, when the property was logged 15 or 20 years ago, they must have cut most of them down. Maybe sugar maples are a high-quality wood, but those loggers had their priorities all wrong. I mean, wood or maple syrup? To me, there's no competition - the syrup wins every time. But regardless, we hiked all around with baling twine (twine from hay bales are plentiful when you have animals, and this is one of the many ways we have come up with to re-use them), just hoping to find some sugar maples that we could tie a piece of twine around to mark it, so we knew what to look for in February, when it's time to tap.

Orrin's recently figured out the difference between the sugar maple leaves and the red maple leaves, so that's what we were looking at. The leaf shape is very similar between the two, but the red maple leaves have little serrations all around the outside edges, and the sugar maples have smooth edges. Ambitiously, I had grabbed 20 lengths of twine, hoping to find that many trees to tag. I jokingly said that we couldn't go home until we'd found 20, but we didn't quite get there. We managed to find 16 sugar maples, although most of them are pretty small trees, since they've mostly just been growing in the last 15 years or so. Apparently it's not recommended to tap trees that are less than 10” in diameter, so that rules out a number of them for next year. Although, we might fudge it on a few of them that are close because, well, we really like maple syrup. We did manage to find 2 rather large trees that we could put a couple taps into each when the time comes. They must have been deep enough into the woods that the loggers didn't find them. Lucky us!

I don't have a problem. Really. I could quit my maple syrup habit any time I want to.