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Tapping a Boxelder

Many people might not know this but another name for Box Elder trees is Ash-leaf Maple, and they are in fact a type of maple tree. What most people do know is that maple trees produce delicious syrup. Put those two facts together and you might wonder what does Boxelder (maple) syrup taste like? Delicious.

Before I knew the answer to that question, I wondered the same thing. So when spring came here in North Dakota, I set out to find some suitable trees to tap. I was looking for any healthy looking boxelder a foot in diameter or bigger. Which leads me to my first lesson..

How to Correctly Identify a Boxelder

This was a tough one for me. Our valley is filled with mostly Ash and boxelder trees, which I have a difficult time differentiating sometimes. To know for sure what I was looking at, I looked for trees with seed on them. Both ash and maple have “helicopter” seeds, known as samara, but there are notable differences.

Ash seeds are semi-symmetrical with 2 wings emanating from the center.

Box elder seeds are asymmetrical with a single wing emanating from one side.

Once you know you have box elder, it’s just a matter of waiting for the right time. As spring rolls around and temperatures rise above freezing during the day, the trees begin thawing and all the sugary sap they stored over the winter starts flowing. It’s a pressure change caused by the thawing of the tree that drives the sugary sap up from it’s roots and through it’s tissue as the tree comes back to life. To collect this sap as it travels through the tree you simply drill a hole and tap into this.

Tapping the Tree

The information I found on procedure varies but I’m sticking within the guidelines stated by Minnesota DNR (Department of Natural Resources). I think it’s safe to assume their information would be somewhat “official”.


https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/destinations/state_parks/maplesyrup_how.pdf

Here I’ll go through the process of how I added a second tap to this tree and into one of many old vinegar jugs lying around, which already had a tap going into it. I had simply used a scrap piece of twine (which we also have plenty of on the farm) and strung it through the handle then wrapped it around the tree before tying it off with a slipped knot.

Trees are resilient but it’s still a good idea to have clean equipment. Especially when tapping multiple trees, I suggest sanitizing your bit between trees to avoid spreading disease or infection that might not be apparent.

I started by finding a suitable sun facing section about 2-4 feet up from the base and drilling a hole with my 5/16 inch bit, making sure it had a slight upward angle for better drainage and went no deeper than 3 inches. I also didn’t want to crowd the tap I already had in this tree

After cutting the correct length of semi-rigid 3/8 inch tubing, I guided the sap to my container by inserting one end of the tubing about a half inch into the 5/16 inch hole I drilled, enough that it was snug and didn’t leak.

Before I was done I double checked everything was at least somewhat secure, and that the container wouldn’t sag below the tubing as it filled up by pulling down on it.

Later I upgraded my setup by guiding the tubes to a six gallon water container I just set on the ground (Sorry, I didn’t get any pictures of this). That way I didn’t have to check the containers as often; which wasn’t an issue right away since I was so curious every time anyway.

My best producers were the trees that got sun throughout the day, the warm sunlight helps drive the sap up from the roots. The same concept held true for different taps on the same tree, taps on the sun facing side always produced more sap.

I collected, on average, around 1/2 gallon per tap per day.
This number can vary wildly, based on a number of factors such as time of season, location, and how cold the nights get or how warm the days get. Personally, with 13 taps I collected a total of about 6 gallons of sap a day when the freezing/thawing conditions were met. I’ll go over this more later but that meant I got over a pint and a half of syrup a day from my 13 taps when sap was flowing well.

Making Sap into Syrup

Yes you can just boil the sap down until it seems like syrup, but there’s a few things about the process that are nice to know.

Most maple syrup comes from a specific maple, the sugar maple. This is because it has the highest sugar content (hence the name); it takes about 40 gallons of sugar maple sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. With box elder (ash-leaf maple) it takes about 60 gallons to produce 1 gallon of syrup. This can vary from tree to tree and location to location, but that’s the ratio I often read and what I personally experienced.

This can be done any number of ways but it’s worth keeping in mind the amount of moisture it will introduce into the air, so indoors is probably not where you want to do this unless it’s well vented. I was tempted to use my aluminum turkey cooking pot and burner, but since your concentrating the liquid and ingesting it, it’s probably best to avoid aluminum and stick with a good inert metal like stainless steel. My method consisted of finding every good sized stainless steel pot we had on the farm to set them on whatever heat source I was likely to be around through the day.

The process of boiling sap is not a short one. Because sugar content can vary so often, It also requires pretty constant attention towards the latter half. With a setup specific to sugaring this probably isn’t true but I was working with what I had on the farm. I might build myself a large open top wood-burning barrel stove boiler in the future but for now it’s three boiling pots sitting on top of propane burners.

Back to that attention part! Boiling water with high sugar content can go horribly wrong. The last thing you want to do is accidentally burn the sweet sugar that took so very long to concentrate! When the whole process takes days sometimes, it can be easy to loose track of how much sugar content you actually have or water you’ve boiled off. This is where a thermometer comes in.

It’s pretty universal knowledge that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius. What might be less common knowledge is the fact that these numbers can change significantly depending on altitude or weather conditions. Altitude, and air pressure, have the greatest effect on this. At sea level, water is much closer to boiling at the standard 212. As you rise from sea level, the air pressure drops and with it the temperature water boils at. With all this in mind, always check what temperature your sap begins boiling at and take note. This is useful later, as a baseline to compare with.

My first batch of Syrup, just enough for a few pancakes.

As sugar content (and other various tree blood components) increases, the boiling point of your sap will also rise. If you pay close attention to this change (or lack thereof in the beginning) , it will give a very good idea of where you’re at in the process. When it reaches a boiling temperature about 12 degrees F higher than your baseline, your sap has become ideal syrup. That means it has a high enough sugar content, and therefore low enough available water content, to prevent spoilage.

Make some pancakes and enjoy your homemade syrup!

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To the West!

For two weeks, this Honda CRV was my home, shared with two good friends (one four-legged). It was a bit cramped at times but living out of it was just a means to an end. In fact, I shouldn’t even call it our home. It brought us to our home, a new one each night we were on the road.

It was February 19th, the first day of our adventure. We took off late after getting packed, trying to escape the bitter cold of North Dakota as soon as we could. We woke up Wednesday morning in Glendive, MT ready to hit the road again so we made our coffee, cooked some food, and took off west across Montana. The day went by quick and the weather was chasing us.

We got into the gallatin range as night fell and searched around for a place to camp but ended up pulling into Big Sky. As we looked through some maps we came across a short hike leading to a waterfall. Since the night was still young, we thought it would be the perfect time to stretch our legs. By the time we hit the trail, the clouds began to part just as the moon was coming out over the peaks. Luckily, the trail was well worn so snow wouldn’t be an issue but still we left our four legged friend behind in the comfort of a warm vehicle. It was nice to let our eyes adjust and walk by moonlight. The hike started out nice, quiet, but as the moon reached further and further into the sky, the world lit up around us.

I don’t usually like driving at night when there’s a sight to see, but the full moon was out and the scenery was lit up so I kept on. Road conditions weren’t ideal but there were things to see, so I didn’t mind driving slow and taking in the moonlit view. As we made our way down south from Big Sky, we skirted the western edge of Yellowstone National Park. As we entered the park, as if on queue, a small group of bull elk surrounded the road, casting massive silhouettes of their antlers. This is the thing I most regret not photographing but they were awfully close and didn’t seem to appreciate our company.

As we approached the Idaho border, so too did we approach the end of the public land, and as great as the driving was going, the long hours on the road were setting in. So, we were keeping our eye out for a place to call home for what remained of the night. With no better alternatives among the deep snow covered roads, we ended up in a snowmobile parking lot. It wasn’t ideal but all I needed was a bit of shut eye before we hit the road again. Four hours later the sun was up and soon after our coffee was made; we were ready to see Idaho.

It was a gorgeous sunrise. The roads quickly cleared as we made our way out of the mountains and into the snake river valley, and we were back to highway speeds. Once we had cell service again we plotted our course across Idaho. We decided US Route 20 would take us through more scenery so we stuck to it and made some miles. As we made our way through the state, I grew quite fond of it. It seemed like the perfect hub between my home state and the west, rural flatland in the valley with adventurous mountains looming all around it.

  • How many deer do you count?

When we found our way to the snake river we stopped off to take in the view while we cooked up some breakfast and made some more coffee (it was a big part of this trip). From there our next stop was Craters of the Moon National Monument, which had been on my “to see” list for awhile. The snow-pack covering it all left a lot to the imagination, but it was still a sight to see. Not far past we spotted a herd of Elk and a sun bathed hillside filled with deer. It was all just enough to make the long drive go by a bit quicker.

We had just a few more scenic mountains to go through as we followed the Oregon Trail into it’s name sake; Oregon. It was getting late as we started into Oregon, but the moon was out again soon enough. Our mission for the night was to make it to some BLM land with a hot spring that I had found out was along our route. Our hopes weren’t terribly high so we were pleasantly surprised when we arrived.

It was magnificent; exactly what we needed. It was freezing out but that didn’t matter. The hot springs ranged from hot to too hot, and they melted away all the cold North Dakota had instilled in us.

Unfortunately, we still had miles to make so we had to leave this heavenly spot behind before we were ready. We were nearly to our midpoint. The seed that sprouted into our two week road trip, snowboarding at Mt. Bachelor. As we approached Bend, we were amazed by the lack of snow and the open forest we were driving through. Little did we know how drastic of change the landscape was about to undertake.

The hot springs had replenished us and we were ready to hit the slopes hard and hard it was. With three days of non-stop snow and wind, we spent three days on a mountain we never saw. By the final day we saw more than four feet of snow fall in the three days we snowboarded.

I think this being my only photo from an entire snowboarding trip is evidence of just how “bad” the conditions were.

It was perfect for snowboarding and our party had a great time but the traffic-ridden white-out drive through constant fresh snow wasn’t so fun. Still, it’s hard to complain when a lot of snow is exactly what we all wanted.

After leaving Bend behind, the white out conditions hardly let up as we drove south to more appropriate weather. South because our original route farther west was blocked by an avalanche. Slowly the snow turned to rain and it was nice to see the road again, although it would still be a few days until we saw the sun.

To be continued in another post, one filled with pictures of Coastal Redwoods…

Until then you can check out more photos from this trip in my gallery