The Rural Voice, 2004-03, Page 28Tapping all
resources
The Hoover familg boosts their
maple sgrup production by making
use of roadside trees
Story and photo by Keith Roulston
An over -logged, immature bush hasn't stopped Terry
and Diane Hoover and Terry's brother Bob from
producing maple syrup on their Atwood -area farm.
They just looked around and found a handy asset standing
by the side of the road.
The Hoovers have a 50 -acre bush with about 40 acres
of hard maple, ash a`nd black cherry on their 100 acre farm.
The bush had been heavily logged prior to their buying it
more than a decade ago and the trees are small enough that
they have only about 300-400 taps in the bush itself.
(They tap nothing under 10 inches in diameter.) To
increase production, however, they have 700 taps in
roadside trees in the block surrounding their farm.
There's another reason for tapping the roadside trees,
says Terry who does most of the talking for the brothers..
"The roadside trees have a really big crown so they have a
much higher sweetness (in their sap). The roadside trees
around here average five to six per cent whereas our bush
trees average 1.75 to two per cent."
When they tap trees on roadsides they ask permission
and make arrangements with the adjacent landowners.
Roadside trees are tapped into 40 -gallon plastic barrels,
generally 20 taps to a barrel so they will hold full -day's
run. The sap is collected through sealed lines so no dirt can
get in. When buckets were being used the amount of dirt in
24 THE RURAL VOICE
Above, Bob Hoover taps a tree during a demonstration
last spring. At left, he shows the vacuum tank he uses to
collect from trees tapped along roadsides.
the sap would be phenomenal. he said.
An the roadside lines are numbered with cattle tags to
identify which goes where. A map in the sap shack (the
Hoovers' name for their sugar shanty) shows which lines
go with which trees so that when the lines are taken down,
they can be put back up in the proper place the next season.
The lines are washed out before put into storage.
They use a vacuum tank with a gas engine -powered
vacuum pump, mounted on a wagon, to collect sap from
the barrels along the roadsides.
The Hoovers' bush is very flat so they've had to create
fall for their pipeline by starting high at the back of the
bush and getting lower toward the front to create a gravity
feed.
"Everybody thinks when you put vacuum on the line
that you're sucking the sap out of the hush," Terry says.
"Basically you're helping the sap along. You still want it
all running downhill."
The bush lines are left up permanently but the roadside
lines must be rolled up and stored each year.
The ice storm in Quebec led many producers like the
Hoovers to adopt a new way of attaching permanent lines
to the trees using a hose -covered wire. In the ice storm
farmers who had attached the pipeline to the tree ended up
with the lines destroyed when trees fell on them. In theory
the hose -covered wire will slide down the tree under such