![]() Songbirds, woodpeckers, and cavity nesters use the sugar maple as a home.īrockman, C.F. White-tailed deer, moose, porcupine, squirrels and snowshoe hare commonly eat the bark, twigs, or fruit of the sugar maple. Sugar maple is of high ecological importance, providing food and shelter for a wide variety of organisms. ![]() Sugar maple constitutes about 6% of the hardwood saw timber value in the US, with rising production of saw timber and firewood. The wood is valued for being hard, heavy and strong common uses include furniture, flooring, and veneer as well as tool handles, musical instruments, and baseball bats. Native Americans also used the sap as a fresh or fermented beverage or soured as vinegar when cooking meat. Along with honey, sugar maple was the main source of sweetener for Native Americans and early European settlers. The watery sap is boiled or evaporated into a thick syrup or undergoes further evaporation to produce maple sugar, a common candy. An individual tree can produce 5-60 liters of sap per day, which may sound like a lot, but 35-45 liters of sap are required to make 1 liter of syrup. Trees are tapped in early spring when the sap begins to flow and sugar content is highest. It is the favorable tree for syrup production as the sap contains twice the sugar concentration of any other maple species (~2.5% sugar). It is the state tree of New York and is featured on the Canadian flag, evidence of its value to the Northern territories. Sugar maple has huge historical and economic importance for its use in the maple sugar and timber industries. The range of sugar maple extends from Nova Scotia and Quebec at its northern edge, west to Ontario, southeastern Manitoba, and western Minnesota, south to southern Missouri, and east to Tennessee and northern Georgia. It does best on moist, well-drained soils and poorly on dry, shallow, or swampy soils. Sugar maple is a shade tolerant tree common in many northern hardwood and mixed forests. ![]() It is one of the largest and most important hardwood species in North America, typically reaching 70-90 feet in height with a dense, spreading crown. Sugar maple ( Acer saccharum) is a deciduous tree also referred to as hard maple or rock maple. If your spiles do not come with hooks you will need to buy some separately.Leaves – simple, deciduous, usually 5-lobed, and with entire margins.īuds – imbricated, brown, and sharply pointed.įruit – ¾-1″ U-shaped samaras that mature in the fall.īark – variable, gray (often with a brown tinge), and furrowed-scaly when older. You can get the spile and the bucket and lid from your local hardware store, farm store or sometimes local sugar bushes might have some available for sale. For this tool kit, you will need a drill, a maple spile with a hook, a hammer, a sap bucket and bucket lids. You will need a certain set of tools to successfully tap a maple tree, let’s call it your maple tool kit. Maple syrup season ends when the buds on the branches begin to open leaving any sap collected after that point with a bitter aftertaste. Maple syrup season typically takes place between February and April when daytime temperatures reach above 0℃ followed by cold nights which is when the sap starts to flow. ![]() The tree must be a minimum of 25.4+ centimetres in diameter for you to put one tap in, 45 cm for two taps, and 60 cm for three taps. To tell if a maple tree is mature you can look for the rough bark and measure the diameter of the tree at about shoulder length. Maple trees need to be mature before you can remove sap without harming the tree, much like how humans need to be a certain age before giving blood. A few things you should be aware of before tapping a tree is how old the tree needs to be, the temperature, and what tools you will need. ![]() Once you have successfully identified a maple tree it is time to tap it to access that delicious sap. A young maple’s bark will be stone-gray and very smooth, while a mature maple will have furrowed bark with large flat scales that seem to vertically peel off of the tree. Identifying a maple tree by its bark is a bit trickier as there is some variation between a young sugar maple and a mature one. This means the tree’s branches will grow in opposite directions making it easy for you to tell that it is a maple tree. If you look closely you will see each pair of buds is rotated about 180 degrees from the previous set, which helps keep the tree in balance when the buds become branches. Maple trees are unique as they are one of the few trees with opposite leaf buds. While at first it might be hard to tell the difference, maple trees have two very distinguishing features: the bark and the branching patterns. Most Canadians know how to identify a maple tree just by looking at the leaves for that unique maple shape, but how can you tell which tree is a maple tree once all of the leaves are gone? ![]()
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