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.
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.