Red Maple – Knowing their mature size will help choose the species you should plant. Trees also work with surrounding vegetation to prevent soil erosion – now that’s some serious teamwork! Common Shade Trees in Marietta From birds choosing to nest to squirrels hopping from limb to limb. Trees in general provide a natural eco-infrastructure. On a hot and humid day, there isn’t much that compares to a tall glass of ice-water while resting below the canopy of a beautiful shade tree. Time will only tell if this will become a hobby or just an experiment.Anyone who’s spent a summer in Marietta Georgia can attest to the absolute necessity for shade trees. ![]() For this year, he is going to try one more time and see if he can make it any easier on himself. The verdict is still out if this will be something he will do next year. There really wasn't much to share on what was the final product. When many people heard what my husband was doing they asked if they could have some. The time it took to gather the sap, boil it down and bottle it took probably a total of almost two days of time. It was not a success if we were looking to save money. It was another thing that you can say that I made myself like they used to do back in the days of old. It was a little thinner than what you can buy in the store but that could have been because we should have let it boil down a little longer. My husband was able to actually make syrup. Was this experiment a success? I think so for several reasons. The sap is mostly water so it takes approximately 40 times the amount of sap to produce syrup. (You have to boil the jars to sterilize them and get the ready to seal the lids.) The final product yielded a little less than three-quarters of a quart. The positive out of this process was that the whole house smelled like maple syrup, mmm.įinally, around four o'clock that afternoon, he was ready to add the syrup into the hot Ball jars to store them for future use. The one problem was that it build steam up into the house so he had to open up the doors and windows to let the steam out. As the quantity began to get reduced he started to boil some of the sap inside the house on the stove. It took longer than usual to boil down the contents on Monday because of a snow/ice storm that hit the Atlanta area. He still had more sap to boil down which he did on Monday. He was at this all day on Sunday for about eight hours. He began the slow processes by using my turkey roasting pan on the grill and slowly adding sap to the pan as it evaporated the water from the sap. He also bought a kit to help him in the canning process. He had bought lids to go on pint glass jars that I had bought years ago thinking I would can. Last Sunday, he decided he had enough to begin the boiling down process. He said it was hard work carrying 5 gallon buckets out of the woods in the dark with only a flashlight. (This meant that we had maple sap in our freezer, refrigerator and our spare refrigerator.) Since he worked most of the week, he had to go down into the woods in the dark to check his maple buckets. ![]() To his surprise within less than a week he had over 12 gallons of sap ready to be processed. He was expecting that it would take several weeks to gather enough sap to make it worthwhile to boil down and make syrup. Two weeks ago the conditions were just right to gather the sap so he went down to the woods and inserted the taps into the trees and attached the metal buckets to collect the sap. This can only be done when the high temperatures are in the 4o's and the lows are 32 or below. The taps are what are driven into the trunk of the tree to extract the sap. He was able to find a place up in Wisconsin that sells used taps and buckets. It grows naturally in Georgia.įor Christmas all he wanted was the equipment to gather and make maple syrup. The tree's name is Florida Maple aka Acer barbatum. The type of trees that he discovered that grow here in Georgia was a cousin of the northern sugar maple. ![]() Over the last few months, he has studied how they do it up north and the type of maple trees that can be used.ĭuring the hunting season, he identified several trees that could be tapped to gather the maple sap. My husband has always been interested in how they make maple syrup.
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