We were out of maple syrup. A few sweet, sticky droplets clung to the inside of the bottle, but that was it. Those stubborn holdouts wouldn’t fill half the pockets in a waffle and certainly wouldn’t soak a pancake properly.
Instead of following through with our breakfast feast or making a quick run to the store, we had cereal and decided to make our own syrup.
“We have plenty of trees,” Daddy Longlegs reasoned. “Surely, a few of them are maples.”
Thanks to the ever-present assistance of Amazon, our tree tapping kit arrived within 24 hours. Daddy Longlegs wasn’t messing around with this maple syrup business. Of course, this came as no surprise.
When he commits to an idea, he’s all in, which gives me a slight cause for concern because he has also recently toyed with the idea of getting a cow, saying something like, “for as much milk as we go through in a week, it would just make sense.”
Would it, really? I wondered when our new bovine friend would arrive and if Amazon would deliver it to our porch for free, along with the shed, hay, customized bell and whatever else a cow needs to survive in the South.
Putting the cow plan aside, we set out in search of a maple tree with the baby strapped to my chest and Little Legs buzzing circles around us.
“Honeybee,” he said as he buzzed past with his arms bee-hind him, with more of a Tennessee accent than most people in Tennessee. It was hard to tell where he would have picked up such a twang since we go so few places. Is there something in the air or the soil?
Nevertheless, he was becoming more of a Volunteer and less of a Hoosier every day.
“This one looks like a sugar maple,” Daddy Longlegs declared with such confidence, it would be difficult to dispute. Plus, there are a handful of trees that will provide syrup, including the red maple, black walnut, sycamore, ironwood and even the birch. It was no skin off my nose if he picked the wrong tree.
I agreed that we had located the target, a tree. The only other viable, almost-certainly-maple-tree-option was set right in the leach field of our septic system; we can safely assume it would have been shitty tasting syrup.
Daddy Longlegs squatted down next to the tree and drilled a hole, tilted slightly upwards, plugged it with a tap and attached a rubber tube to it. He slid the tube into an old apple juice bottle and waited. And waited.
“Nothing’s happening, babe. Do you think we got the right one?”
Fortunately, I knew from watching Curious George with Little Legs, it could take a while for the sap to flow. We needed freezing nights and above freezing days, some days the flow will be good and other days, not so much, much like life.
For now, we needed to wait and prepare to do some serious boiling because it takes a lot of sap to make syrup. There is a 10 gallon to 4 cup breakdown which makes me appreciate the cost of real maple syrup in the store and question the contents of Pearl Milling’s syrup, the syrup formerly known as Aunt Jemina’s.
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