How do you make your own maple syrup. I live in Michigan and I want to get started

[Mibasshunter]

How do you make your own maple syrup. I live in Michigan and I want to get started

[Walt Smith]

I made 19 pints last year, what I did was I bought 1" PVC straights and cut the top half off from them at the half way point, I used a dewalt hammer drill and a 1" spade bit and drilled into the tree halfway the length of the PVC straight. Clean bark out of hole with your finger. then I wrapped pipe thread tape around the PVC straight right in front of the cut out. Using a rubber mallet I pounded the PVC into the tree and used gallon milk jugs with a hole for the PVC tied around the tree for collecting sap. I emptied the sap into some big clean jugs I had and then strained the sap through a funnel with a t-shirt filter to catch all the crap that gets into the sap. then I used my pot from my turkey fryer and boiled it down using the burner on my gas grill. Lots of gas and lots of time involved in this but it was lots of fun and yummy too.Takes 40 gallons of sap to get 1 gallon of syrup so you are always adding sap to the cook pot. when I got about 2-3 inches of good heavy brown sap in the pot I brought it inside and finished it on the stove, pour hot sap into hot mason jars and put seals and lids on about 1/4 turn after lid is snug, lids will seal in about a hour if they don't, turn jars upside down and then they will. Enjoy!

[Walt Smith]

When you're tired of running sap,and you will be, pull the PVC out of the tree and cut some small green maple trees to use as plugs, put some black tar on the outside of the plug and pound them in, smear some tar on the ends of the plugs too, this will keep the tree in good health.