My Bigleaf Sugar Bush

A dripping tap. CD Lloyd Photograph

The sap is running! For the last few days we’ve had the sweet combination of freezing nights, above freezing days, and ample soil moisture that are needed to produce Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum) sap. The forecast looks very promising for the next week, so with luck we will get enough sap for several gallons of nectar al a Ent.

 

Up until now, this has been a pretty pathetic winter for maple syrup, but for strange reasons. Our first hard frost was October 29^th, which is about normal. Then three weeks later winter came on strong with a major Fraser outflow event from November 19^th through the 26^th followed by one day without frost and another 13 days of consecutive frost. What should have been three perfect weeks of weather (during a period that on average only has 2 frost days) hardly yielded a drop, a fact that I attribute to the dryness of the ground and perhaps temperatures that didn’t get far enough above freezing (usually we have the opposite problem). The weather then turned warm and wet from December 11^th to the 18^th and when the next cold snap hit I got more sap in two good days than I did the previous three weeks. January only had nine days of frost (compared to an average of 21), but hardly any sap flowed, this time perhaps on account of the temperatures that weren’t far enough below freezing, or the ground being too dry again (as any skier will tell you, we haven’t received much precipitation this winter).

Here is a graph I made from data recorded at the Bellingham Int. Airport

However, last week our luck turned and we got a good soaking of rain that was immediately followed by freezing nights. Yesterday, when I installed a few new taps, I was rewarded with immediate flow, and today my dad and I rounded up 8 gallons of sugary tree water. Oh Joy!

I've noticed needle ice on some of our best maple sap days. CD Lloyd Photograph

Last year Katrina and I had so much fun making our own maple syrup that we decided to scale our operation up considerably this year. That meant finding more trees, purchasing more taps, and building a larger evaporator. Naturally, this was all done in my frugal forager manner, so aside from the taps and hosing, everything was built myself from recycled or scrounged materials.

Bigleaf Maple tap kit

I don’t camp out at my sugar bush, so my tapping equipment must be large enough to hold a few days of sap and tight enough to keep out rain, insects, and debris. I use 5/16” Tree Saver brand taps and connect them in pairs to a ¼” barb tee with about 6” of 3/8” OD vinyl tubing (both available at any good hardware store), and then connect another 12” of tubing to a plastic 5 gallon cooking oil jug that I scavenge from a local restaurant and wash thoroughly. The rig looks a little like a stethoscope, but works well. This year we tapped all of my dad’s maples, and his neighbor was kind enough to let us tap his as well, so all told, we have about 2 dozen taps (a modest operation). We certainly would like to expand. The presence of Bigleaf Maples is high on the priority list of our “perfect” piece of property.

My worn out mini evaporator and the nearly finished replacement

Scaling up meant saying goodbye to the hole riddled woodstove that my brother salvaged from a sunken boat, and hello to something larger. But what? It is difficult to pick up a used evaporator here in the Pacific Northwest, and I learned last year that setting a pot on top of a wood stove is terribly inefficient. For a while I hankered over professionally constructed evaporators build specifically for commercial scale sugar bushes, but sticker shock finally brought me back to my senses; I’m not ready for an evaporator that is rated for 5+ gallons an hour and costs $3K. Rather, I redirected my energy towards designing and building an evaporator better suited to my needs. 1-2 gallons an hour is more than sufficient, and cheap is best of all.

Door latch

I designed my evaporator around a 21 quart (full sized) stainless steel steam table tray- the kind you see in buffets and salad bars. For $5 at the scrap yard, I had myself an evaporator tray that didn’t require any welding. The stove box, however, was another matter. From the same scrap yard, I purchased a 4’x8’ sheet of 12 gauge steel and about 10 feet of angle iron for another $50. My stove dimensions are 12” wide x 25” long x 18” tall, so I started by cutting a 12” x 86” rectangle using a ferrous metal blade in my circular saw. I carefully laid out my corners, and then kerfed out ¾ of the metal thickness in each corner and bent the sheet into a cube. I cut the angle iron into four 24” long legs, and tacked them onto the corners. Then I cut a 12”x25” base and welded it to the bottom, and welded a small piece of steel to the back end of the stove top with a 3” hole and a short piece of 3” pipe for the stove pipe junction. The door was the biggest challenge, but I found a perfect oval of steel at the scrap yard, and coaxed my dad into cutting out the same shape with a cutting torch. We fastened the door to the stove with weld-able hinges, and I made a little latch out of a bolt, a strap of steel, and an old spring. Next I drilled two air ports in the front of the stove, and welded on short sections of 2” pipe. I bricked the inside, welded up a grate, and painted the entire thing with stove paint. The evaporator tray slides down into the firebox where the flames can hit it directly, and a stove gasket is glued to the rim of the evaporator tray to seal in the heat and smoke. This was my first welding project, so the first few were terrible, but by the end, I was in the flow and I am very pleased with the product. It didn’t hurt the pocket book either- my entire evaporator cost me less than $100.

The sugar shack ready for action.

I will probably replace the 3” stove pipe with 6” stove pipe when I get some, and have plans of eventually hooking up a fan to turbo charge the burn. If I don’t use a fan, I will install some perforated pipe just under the evaporator tray to add extra oxygen. My evaporator took a while to get going with a pan of cold sap, but once it was burning hot I evaporated 4 gallons in about 3 hours on my first try. The fire box is big enough that it will burn for an hour or more between refueling, which is a nice interval for working on other projects.

Usually I only evaporate my sap to about 50 percent sugar concentration and put it in canning jars or in the freezer until I have enough to “finish” a large batch. However, Bigleaf Maple syrup has been so long anticipated this winter that I just had to finish the most recent batch. Now, ¾ of a quart of amber syrup glows brightly from the pantry. How sweet it is! I can’t wait to check the taps again.

A nice boil

Liquid gold. CD Lloyd Photograph

 Special thanks to Christian Lloyd for three of his excellent photographs. You can read about his sailing adventures and see more of his work at Life on Water.

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More salt making

Evaporating salt into darkness

LASER evaporation

Katrina and I made some more salt with our friends Paul and Eli out on Lummi Island. We stayed up into the night to finish and I took some fun photographs.

Long time readers may remember our early methods, which have continued to evolve. When not taking the salt works on the road, we now use our smokehouse/sugar shack/salt shack to keep the rain out of the brine. I am also putting the final touches on a new evaporator for combined maple syrup and salt use. More to come soon!


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Year end foraging reflections

To Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, winter was traditionally a season rich with feasting, song, dance, storytelling, and reflecting. Little food gathering was required during the dark, wet winters since the diverse landscape provided ample sustenance throughout the preceding seasons. These past years as I have tried to tune my needs to the abilities of the environment to provide, I similarly find myself with little that is new on my foraging to do list and happy to share food and stories during this sodden season. Now with winter here, the Christian holiday of giving fresh in our memories, and a new year upon us, I reflect on my year’s foraging and the meaning of it all.

Never before has my larder been so full. Twelve cases of canned food sit beside my desk, the freezer is stuffed to the gills, and dried goods are overflowing the shelves to fill odd nooks throughout the house. Two years ago, I was happy to say we ate a wild food item every day, but now our diet is more than half wild, and I am beginning to conceive, at least to some degree, what is required to collect a year’s worth of food. The foraging fantasy is becoming palpable and my appetite for it is stronger than ever. For meat we have 50 lbs of frozen, canned, or smoked salmon, and 100 pounds of frozen and canned venison. Our starch supply consists of at least 200 lbs of Wild Rice and 15 pounds of acorns; for fruit we have 5 gallons of huckleberries, 10 gallons of blueberries, 5 gallons of Blue Elderberry juice, 8 gallons of apple sauce, 5 gallons of plums, 2 gallons of Salal, and small amounts of various other fruit leathers, powders, and preserves. Vegetable and oil are not so well represented. Beyond 20 servings of frozen stinging nettle, 6 gallons of green beans, and a dozen pints of canned tomatoes, we rely heavily on the grocery store for veggies, but next year we hope to expand our garden production and I want to experiment with canning wild vegetables, like the stalks of Cow Parsnip. Our wild sugar supply just dried up today, when I rinsed the last drops of our maple syrup into a smoothie, but I just tapped a few Bigleaf Maples and was pleased to see the sap running, so we needn’t starve our syrup cravings for long. What’s more, we’ve enough homemade sea-salt to season our meals, and ample home-brewed cider to wash them down. Surrounded by so much excellent food, every meals has the spirit of thanksgiving as we can’t help but recall with each dish, the landscapes that fed us and the adventures we had while foraging our favorite foods.

The only thing better than eating nature’s bounty, is sharing it. This holiday season we have been blessed with a rich social calendar of family dinners, potlucks, and year-end socials with community organizations. Long gone are the days of grabbing something quick at the grocery store. Last week when a long time member of our local Native Plant Society chapter hosted a Holiday potluck, we shared our Wild Rice, acorn bread with Crabapple Butter, and a wild berry pie. Making the pie really got me thinking about the point of all this harvesting.

When I go to the pantry to put together a meal, it is a journey into a mystical place where space and time are blurred. What is a wild berry pie, but a filling made of hot August sun on lakeside salal and the first September frost on ripe mountain huckleberries, and a crust made of an island oak grove infused with salty October air? Reaching for ingredients is a reflection on the harvest to produce a meal in the fourth dimension: The early Salal was good but the late berries dried up. The Garry Oaks hardly produced this year but the Red Oaks did well. I’ve long believed that the ease with which these details are recalled is evidence that we are specifically designed for the tasks of growing intimate with our environment. This year, however, the lesson has extended even further. In feeding others, I’ve come to see that the stories these foods evoke are perhaps the most natural means of transmitting meaningful ecological information about the land we inhabit. In some societies it is a constant reminder of the importance of stewardship. We hope that in our society—so long divorced from the wild world—that a taste of nature and the story of its path to the plate will at least arouse a curiosity to reconnect.

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"Erica" pie, a bioregional dessert

Here is a regionally inspired recipe for wild berry pie. You can think of it as a huckleberry pie with greater fruit variety and an acorn flour crust. I call it “Erica” pie because Salal and the various huckleberries and blueberries are all in the Heath family, which is known to botanists as Ericaceae.

Acorn Crust (top and bottom for 9” pie)

1.5 cups acorn flour

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon sea salt

1 cup coconut oil

2/3 cup ice cold water

“Erica” Filling

1 cup Salal (Gaultheria shallon)

1 cup Red Huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium)

1 cup Black Huckleberry (V. membranaceum)

1 cup Evergreen Huckleberry (V. ovatum)

1 cup Cascade Blueberry (V. deliciosum)

1/2 cup acorn flour

½ cup maple syrup

1 tablespoon coconut oil

Pinch of salt

Blend acorn flour, all-purpose flour, and salt together and then mix in the coconut oil (or butter) with a pastry knife. Add 1/3 cup water and mix briefly, and then slowly add the additional 1/3 cup water while mixing slowly and deliberately. Stop adding water as soon as all the dough can be clumped into one large ball without falling apart. Cut the ball in half and roll each half into a new ball. Then squish each into a flat disc, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for 1 to several hours. Roll the bottom crust out on a piece of foil or parchment and place it in a pie pan, trimming the excess with a knife and poking a few fork holes in the bottom of the crust. Mix the berries, flour, syrup, oil, and salt for the filling, and pour into the pie pan. Roll out the top crust and place over the fruit, pinching the top and the bottom crusts together. Cut several slits in the top crust to allow hot air to escape. 

Bake the pie for 1 hour at 350 degrees. Allow the pie to cool for another hour or two before serving.

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