Sugar maple

When conditions are just so, the beautiful sugar maple yields its precious sap, writes JACKIE FRENCH

The easiest home-grown sweetener is maple syrup. It’s ridiculously easy to grow and make, in a totally amateur way. Professionals, please stop reading now.

Sugar maple (Acer saccharum) grows in cold to subtropical climates. This tree needs full sun in cold climates, semi-shade in hot areas, and deep, moist soil. But you’ll only get spectacular red and gold autumn leaves in cooler climates, and the sweet sap only flows when you have a frosty spring night followed by a warm day. Even in the best sugar maple climates, this doesn’t happen every day.

The trunk of your tree should be 30cm wide before you begin tapping, although (shhh) I accidentally tapped mine when it was half that size. Professional tappers drill holes 6.4cm deep at waist height, away from previous holes, as the tree needs to heal. They then insert tubes that allow the sap to flow into buckets. One big tree may have several holes.

My happy accident happened when

I was pruning off a small branch in August and the sap started flowing like a small creek. I ran to get an empty 2L plastic milk bottle. With the top cut off, and holes in the back to tie it snugly to the tree, no sap was lost. We needed every drop of it, because it takes about 4L of sap to end up with 100ml of syrup.

Making the syrup is easy. Just simmer the sap so it evaporates. It’s ready when it bubbles like a volcano and turns gold. If you simmer it for too long, you’ll end up with delicious maple toffee. If you don’t simmer it enough, it won’t be as caramelised or sweet, and it may also ferment if you don’t eat it straight away. (You probably will.)

The next time I tapped, I used a drill and inserted a tube into a bucket. But just one bucket. Our oldest sugar maple tree is only about 25 years old, and it takes about 40 years to grow one that’s really worth tapping for 4–6 weeks in the perfect maple syrup climate, which possibly doesn’t exist here in Australia.

So why do we do it? Because it’s sticky and great fun. It seems miraculous to get a delicious harvest from a tree that looks as inedible as the sugar maple does.

That half cup of syrup at the end of all the work is a triumph. As every gardener knows, home-grown and home-cooked is by far the best, assuming reasonable cooking skill – but very little flair is needed to boil down maple sap into syrup.

Don’t let kids be involved with the boiling process, except under the supervision of a sensible adult. Boiling syrup can give a savage burn. Do not even try this if you are not a sensible adult with a sense of fun and adventure, who will be satisfied with half a cup of home-grown syrup poured over homemade pancakes – the most delicious you have ever tasted.

So plant sugar maples because they are beautiful and tough. Don’t depend on a maple syrup harvest. But if the stars sparkle brightly on a frosty night, and the day warms up so much that the cat decides to sleep in the sun on the garden wall, you might just try for your own harvest of incredibly fresh, sweet, impossibly wonderful maple syrup.