I read and learned a lot more today. My daughter came over while I was reading and we decided to hike down into the hollow again. She spotted at least a half dozen mature maples down where I found the big one, and there are probably hundreds of small ones on our property. I found some that are in the 20-30s on our land, but only one so far that's old enough to tap. It's a good sized one too, right on the corner of the property at the bottom of the hollow. I might have a few more that sit along the edge of the hollow, I'll check in a few more days.

Some of them down there were riddled with woodpecker holes and literally dripping with sap. You could wet your finger with it and taste the sweetness. These trees also had ants collecting sap, they were all over the wet spots.

Apparently, the temps have to drop below freezing at night, and get up into the 40's in the day, for the trees to produce sap. The more days you have like that the more sap you'll get, but the sweetest sap is what comes early.

For here, mid-January is when you want to start collecting. We've had a run of days with temps that fit the bill here so that explains the trees we saw today that were all wet with sap. We're heading into a short warm spell, and then back to perfect tapping weather, so if I find a couple more big trees on our land I might gather some up.

The truths is, here where I'm at in the Ozarks we'll be the first to see the end of being able to collect sap, and we may not have many, if any, Sugar Maples at all here in another 100 years. If I collect sap and make syrup I could well be one of the very last to have done it here.

On the other hand, if things manage to get back to normal our property has a lot of young Sugar Maples on it, so there may be some things I can do to help those along, and hopefully keep the sap flowing. That would be good. From what I've read, our native americans showed the europeans how to collect it and cook it down into syrup and sugar. It's one of the few things that europeans learned from them and founded an industry on. I do feel compelled to do it because of that.

But I will leave that big old maple unmolested. It's just too awesome to consider drilling a hole into. It's at least 30+ inches in diameter at chest height and must be at least several hundred years old and it barely escaped being killed by the lake during flood years. It's really an amazing tree.

My daughter took a few pictures of the trunk of the big tree where the rings from woodpecker holes have scarred it. It's really pretty cool looking, they give the old tree a lot of character, and she also took some pictures of others that were all wet with sap. I'll post them when I get them from her.
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