Preparing for the season’s first food harvest is a fun way to spend a few hours during winter’s deep freeze. Cornell University Cooperative and New York’s DNR have an excellent PDF “Maple Syrup Production for the Beginner.” Wikipedia features a comprehensive overview of syruping.
Trees of many maple species will flow sweet sap as soon as daytime temperatures rise into the high 30s while nights drop below the freezing point. That can happen in early February down South and six weeks later in Canada.
Syruping is fun, educational and a wonderful activity to share with children. It can be done far beyond the classic syruping regions of New England, Canada and the Lake States. We’ve been in touch with families from North Dakota to North Carolina who make maple syrup. We’ve made gallons in Iowa. All it takes is a tree or two of any maple species, the right weather and simple tools. When done properly, it doesn’t hurt the tree. Silver, sugar, black, and red maples all run sweet sap. So does the box elder, which is a true maple.
You’ll find past blogs on Winding Pathways that show how to make simple syruping equipment. Type maple syruping in the search box at the bottom of the screen or click on this link. Almost everyone already has everything needed to make small quantities of syrup, but it’s easier and a bit more sanitary to use manufactured equipment.
Many companies sell syruping equipment, but most are geared to supply large commercial operations. Tap My Trees is different. They sell easy-to-use equipment to folks wanting to tap a few backyard trees. Their website also includes helpful information on how to tap trees, collect sap, and boil it into syrup. Check it out!
Clear sap dripping into the bucket.
A clean milk jug makes a simple “bucket” to collect sap.
Carrying “modern buckets” on a yoke.
Maple Syrup’s taste is stronger with a deeper amber.
A traditional sugar shack
Modern equipment make backyard syruping easy and pleasurable.
Catalpas are tough trees that thrive in hostile environments. Their beautiful blooms attract pollinators.
We recently invited our neighbors to Winding Pathways for an evening of conversation. It was early winter and talk turned to trees.
“We have an odd tree growing in our yard. I have no idea what it is, but it has bit heart shaped leaves and later in the summer long beans dangle down from it,” said Patty a neighbor from down the street.
Her description was perfect. It was a Northern Catalpa. No other tree matches her observations.
Winter is a wonderful time to study trees. In midsummer their branch structure and twigs are usually invisible beneath leafy clothing. Not so in winter when buds, twigs, trunk, and branches can be easily seen. Often they yield clues revealing its species.
One of our favorite tree finding tools is on the Website of the National Arbor Day Foundation. Click on the “tree” tab and a simple identification guide pops up like magic on the computer screen. The Arbor Day Foundation also sells dozens of tree species at reasonable prices and a visit to Arbor Day farm in Nebraska City, Nebraska is memorable. It’s just south of Omaha and is where J. Sterling Morton founded Arbor Day.
One year at Winding Pathways we planted a few trees and tended them all summer. They were doing great until one September night. A buck deer decided that our new trees were perfect for rubbing off the velvet that covered his newly formed antlers. Just a few minutes of determined rubbing killed our precious trees!
Deer antlers start growing in early spring and by late August are fully formed. Velvet on the outside of the growing antlers is rich with blood and minerals. By September its purpose is done. Bucks rub the velvet off to prepare their antlers for battle with rivals when the mating season starts in November.
Deer have the uncanny knack of rubbing the most valued trees in a yard, and often they remove all the bark, thus killing the tree.
Fortunately, damage is easy to prevent. Just drive fence posts into the ground a few feet out from the tree and attach wire mesh to them to physically keep deer away. Plastic tree guards that attach directly to the trunk also help prevent damage.
Do this now before the deer start to rub. Or you may lose all your new trees in just one night.
Each summer a small tree in our yard produces more delicious cherries than we can harvest and eat.
Tart cherries are outstanding yard trees. They are small, attractive, need little care and begin bearing fruit when only a couple of years old. Trees self-fertile, meaning it’s not necessary to plant two or more for cross pollination. Few insects or diseases bother them but sometimes birds, especially robins, take a fancy to the bright red fruit. Birds prefer mulberries to cherries so we keep a mulberry in the yard as our decoy tree to keep birds from filching cherries.
Commercial nurseries sell two general types of domestic cherry trees-sweet and sour (sometimes called tart or pie cherries). Sweet cherries don’t like subzero winters and are best grown in places warmer than our Iowa yard. The fruit is commonly sold in grocery stores and is delicious fresh. Most varieties need a second tree for cross pollination. In contrast tart cherries don’t seem to mind occasional 25 below zero temperatures and thrive in the north. Rarely sold fresh in stores, tart cherries can usually only be purchased canned. To enjoy delicious fresh tart cherries grow your own.
Two common tart cherry varieties we like are Montmorency and Dwarf North Star. Both produce tasty fruit. Sometimes the fruits are sweet enough to eat right off the tree. But usually their tartness makes them best when used in pies, cobblers, and other baked goods. We like them in our morning oatmeal.
The downside of cherries is the time it takes to pick and pit the small fruits. It can be tedious. Dwarf trees reduce or eliminate the need for ladders, making picking safe, fast and easy. We used to hand pit the fruits using fingers to squeeze the large seed out of each cherry. After a few years of this slow process we bought a cherry pitting device that speeds and eases the process, but it still takes time.
Pitted cherries freeze well. Put a big handful in a plastic freezer bag, squeeze out the air, seal the bag and put it in the freezer to retrieve months later when the urge for cherry pie arises.
As we welcome summer we also begin to indulge in Iowa’s natural harvest of berries and cherries. Mulberries must be ripe because purple colored bird droppings mark lawns and sidewalks. Scat from raccoons and coyotes are full of seeds. Mulberries are great to eat out of hand and we get great laughs from the purple tongues and fingers that result from our munching them.
Black Raspberries, or “Black caps”, are ripening. Red raspberries big as your thumb fall into your hands and cherries hang tantalizingly just beyond reach on the most slender branches. If the weather stays warm but moist, we will have excellent blackberries come mid-July into August.
Squirrels and birds naturally have an advantage over humans and our chickens make sure that they clean up any cherries that escape the squirrels. But we are out with the best of them harvesting the fruits of an Iowa summer, indulging in fresh berries by the handful and freezing some for winter.
Take time to walk a trail and have fun with summer’s bounty.
Winding Pathways has had fun this spring working with neighbor children on syruping. While the season here in Iowa has ended, in more northern and Eastern areas it is still in full swing. The 2015 syruping season may last longer in the north east because of the deep snow and continued cold. Take in the excitement of a syrup festival in your region and take time to tap a tree in your backyard. Things will pop fast, so go outside and play!
