Since our move to Vermont, I’ve been dreaming of maple syrup, and thinking ahead to what we need to get ready for backyard sugaring season. Back in Missouri, we tapped the trees available to us: black walnuts. Black walnut tree sap makes a delicious syrup with a woodsy, earthy, nutty flavor, but I really prefer the clean, bright sweetness of maple syrup for baking and cooking. Fortunately, we are renting a property that has a small sugarbush of mature sugar maples. Right now, we’re preparing the supplies we’ll need to tap our backyard trees. In this post, I teamed up with Vermont Evaporator Company to help you get ready now so you can head into sugaring season ready to make syrup! What … [Read more...]
Making Syrup in Your Backyard
Did you know that you can make syrup from trees growing in your own backyard? It's true! You don't need a lot of acreage and a sugarbush to tap trees and make delicious syrup. Our family tapped only 14 black walnut trees last winter, and made 5 quarts of syrup - enough to last our family of four for close to one year! Tapping is easy, fun, and is a great activity to do with children. Plus homemade syrup is an outstanding natural sweetener to add to baked goods and desserts. Here's how to get started making syrup in your backyard. Making Syrup from your Backyard Trees Step One: Identify tappable trees Even if you only have one tappable tree in your … [Read more...]
How to Tap Black Walnut Trees for Syrup
As the days lengthen and the first signs of warmth, sun, and green grass creep into our lives, we've undertaken a super-exciting project: tapping the black walnut trees on our property to make syrup. Although sugar maples are the tree of choice for commercial sugaring due to their high ratio of sugar to water in their sap, many other types of trees can be tapped to make syrup, including silver and red maples, hickory, birch, box elder, and walnuts. Having tasted the delicious, light, and refreshing sap of black walnut at our neighbor's house last winter, we were eager to tap our own trees this year and to experiment with making black walnut syrup. First off, a few basics of … [Read more...]