2018 Ramos Tribe Maple Makers

After a month and a half of continuous Maple sap harvesting, boiling down sap to the amber gold syrup, jarring syrup and making pancakes to test syrup, our season has come to a close. I am so glad Maple season is only about one month a year or I would probably go insane!  Keith built me my awesome evaporator that boiled down  about 4 times fast then the original turkey fryer. My arms are super strong from  hauling and chopping wood for the fires, does that count as a workout? If we go by the way my muscles feel then the answer is YES! Syrup making was fun, challenging and on many days down right annoying. Snow storms threw off my boiling schedule and then many days I was busying playing catch up.

Last year we had 12 taps and boiled over a turkey fryer. We bought our house in the fall when there were no leaves on the trees so last year was a guessing game of which trees were maple.  This last fall, before leaves fell, we were smart and went and painted our maple trees with a dab of paint so we would know which were maple. Smart huh? So now we have about 40 trees we can tap and most of those can be double tapped because of the size. This year we had 24 taps. Over the 5 weeks of the season, we collected 433 gallons of sap. With a ratio of about 40-1, we boiled down to about 10.8 GALLONS of syrup. yes GALLONS!!!!!

I am so pleased with the results and now that we are done, I can breathe a sigh of relief and be thankful for that hard work. Keith and I do love attempting to grow our own food to a point. We garden and harvest veggies, meat(if possible) fish, berries and anything else we find. I wouldn't say we are fully living off the land, since we don't raise chickens for eggs or anything like that but we mostly don't do that because we also like to travel, but it is nice to do what we can.  It will be nice to use all the maple for sugar instead of having to buy as much sugar, and it is healthy and about as organic as you can get. At least I tell myself that. I have found a hundred recipes for maple things, if you have any pass them my way. So far our favorite recipes have been Maple Pecan Pork chops, Maple Cream pie and crepes with maple.

 Last Batch

 Ramos Tribe Maple Syrup- Our label. I love Baobab Trees and I carved this stamp years ago in Galena. Keith used it to make a label. I love it! Bringing our African to Maine!