What´s the Most Efficient Way to Get the Most Sap From Your Maple Trees?

Well, you've landed yourself in the right spot if your wondering how to get the most out of your maple trees this season. My name is Mia and for a school project, I had to find the answer to this question. I have been making maple syrup in the backyard for as long as I can remember. There are many variables when tapping your trees such as temperature, and the way you have tapped them (too high/too low, not deep enough/ to deep). There are also a few different ways to get the sap out of the trees. The three ways that I have in my backyard (and that gave me the data for my experiment) are buckets, lines, and a lunchbox vacuum releaser.

I feel like this is the most common approach for beginners or if you have a single maple tree in the backyard farther away from the rest. This method is when you take a drill and drill into one tree and tap the bucket into the tree. The bucket has a little spout that allows the sap to flow out of the tree and into your bucket. Some years we will get a lot from the bucket methods but this year we didn't get too much. Over a four-day span, we only collected 1 tablespoon. In order to make all of these methods fair I multiplied 1 tablespoon by 65 (because that's the number of trees on the releaser) and got a total of 4 cups. So, if you had 65 trees that were tapped with the bucket method you would probably get around 4 cups of sap which would basically boil down to nothing. The bucket approach is completely gravity-based which means you have to drill at an angle so the sap will drip out. This method really relies on you having the perfect angle, and temperature, and a lot of waiting. Honestly, I think this was the least efficient way out of the three methods solely because you would have to wait a very long time in order to make any maple syrup!

The line approach almost turns your backyard into an obstacle course. Ducking under the lines that crisis cross through the woods could be fun, but how much sap does it actually collect? In order to set up the drop lines, you have to find lots of maple trees that are close together. Then you drill holes into the trees and place a spout into everyone so that you can connect your tubing. After all that is complete your mainline will do all the work for you and collect the sap into 1 bucket. At our house, we have a total of 35 trees connected to the mainline. This year with the tubing we collected a total of 4 gallons. This means If the lines were connected to 65 trees you would get around 8 gallons in a four-day span! In about 20 days you could have around a gallon of maple syrup for your pancakes! You might be wondering, Why is there so much more sap compared to the bucket method? Well, the drop line technique creates a natural vacuum that slowly forces the sap out of the trees. This makes 4 cups look pretty scrawny compared to the 4 gallons you could be collecting!

The final method of sap collecting is a form of man-made vacuum. The Lunchbox Vacuum releaser is a cooler type box that connects your line to a compressor sucking the most sap out of your trees. You have to set up lines, as you would with the line approach, and then connect the mainline to the vacuum releaser. We have 65 trees connected to the releaser but you can have upward of 200 attached to it. There is a gauge that connects to the releaser and it shows how much vacuum your getting. This year we got up to the twenties and thirties on that gauge. With this in mind, we collected upwards of 15 gallons in those four days of running the experiment. That is almost 4 times as much as the line approach and by the end of the week with that sap alone, we were able to make around a gallon of maple syrup.

So the answer to the question is the Lunchbox Vacuum Realerser is definitely the best way to collect sap. This is something great to invest in if you are passionate about maple syrup or want to start a new hobby! I definitely feel like this is something fun and easy to do at home and no matter the way you collect sap you will get something out of those trees.