Dear Annie,
I see my local farms starting to tap their maple trees. I have a couple big maples in the back yard. Is this something I can do at home?–Susan, NH

Dear Susan,
A true (if guilty) pleasure of my childhood was going for a cross country ski on logging roads around my house in NH, and when thirsty, raiding a neighbor’s sap bucket to drink some sap. What sweetness! However, I haven’t tapped myself, so to answer this I asked Joe McHale, who started tapping maple trees at home as a way to teach his children about nature and the origin of food, and has a cool website about it called Tap My Trees.

Here is what he said:
Tapping maple trees is not limited to farms and commercial operations. If you live in the Northeast and have a mature maple tree (at least 12 inches in diameter) in your yard, you can enjoy this experience. The sap flows in maple trees during late winter / early spring (generally late February into April).

When days are warm (above freezing) and nights are below freezing, the sap will flow. The process involves drilling a hole into the tree, inserting a spile, and attaching a bucket and lid.

When the sap is flowing strong, you can collect a couple gallons of sap per tap per day. Other days you will not get any sap. Collecting the sap is the easy part - boiling it into maple syrup is where most of the work lies.

Sap is boiled into syrup based on a 40 to 1 ratio (40 gallons of sap will produce approximately 1 gallon of syrup). Any significant amount of sap should be boiled outdoors, as it will generate a considerable amount of steam.

It’s a fair amount of work, but your pancakes will never taste better than with home made maple syrup. For more details on the process, take a look at www.TapMyTrees.com which provides a detailed explanation of the process.