Here’s a video with Glenn Niese of Putnam Valley. His great-grandfather first started tapping the trees at Niese’s Maple Farm in 1892:

And here’s a link to an earlier post on tapping maple trees with Doug Maass of Sleepy Hollow. That one had a link to my story that ran in the paper that day. That link is long gone, so here’s my story from our electronic library:
—————————
Doug Maass has been tapping maples trees for syrup for the last 33 years, first on 17 acres he owned in Goldens Bridge and more recently around his suburban neighborhood in Sleepy Hollow.

“I just picked it up from reading and watching TV,” Maass says. “I thought I’d give it a try and sure enough it worked on the first try.”

When you watch him tap a neighbor’s sugar maple and hook up a 1-gallon plastic jug in just a couple of minutes, you realize how truly easy this late-winter rite can be. He just drills through the bark to a depth of about 2 inches with a hand-held auger and plugs the hole with a hollow spile, or tap. He then cuts a small hole near the top of the plastic jug and fits it gently over the spile and ties a loop of string around the tree to hold it in place.
Almost immediately, the clear, watery sap begins to drip into the jug.

“You want it to look easy enough that people want to do it but hard enough for them to hire me,” says Maass, who has a business called Got Maples? Make Syrup! to teach homeowners and school groups about maple syrup production.

The jug should be nearly full in 24 hours. “Then you come inside and boil it and boil it and boil it,” he says.

You may think of maple syrup as just a New England thing, but actually New York state ranks second in the country, behind Vermont, in maple syrup production and third worldwide. The state’s 1,500 maple syrup producers made more 332,000 gallons of syrup last year, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the USDA.

“I horde it,” Maass admits. “I give some of it as gifts to family and friends. Because it’s so dear, I appreciate every single drop.”

The sap that drips out of the trees is more than 95 percent water, which is then boiled down to produce the amber-colored liquid gold. It takes an average of 40 gallons of sap to get 1 gallon of syrup.

In a bad year with lousy weather the ratio can go as high as 70 to 1, Maass says. “Sometimes you get almost no season, just a week or two.” Or you can get a great season, with up to eight weeks of production.

Each year is a little different. In general, the maple syrup season begins when the daytime temperatures consistently top 32 degrees and the nighttime temperatures dip back below freezing. Sunny days are best.

When the sap is running, each tree will produce up to 1 gallon a day. You get your fastest sap flow with big temperature variations between night and day, as long as the nighttime temperatures do go below freezing.

Boiling the sap is a tedious, time-consuming process, requiring fairly constant monitoring and lots of filtering to remove impurities. The purest sap won’t be much darker than beer, Maass says.

When he was tapping dozens of trees in Goldens Bridge he would start cooking the sap at 8 a.m. and go until 11 at night. In some years, he made more than 4 gallons of high-quality syrup.

Any maple tree can be tapped, he says, and it does no harm to the trees – the holes seal over by summer. Robust trees with large crowns are the best producers. Very large trees can take as many as four tap holes at a time.

When maple buds begin to form, it’s time to turn off the taps and wait till next year for another round.

For more info…
To get in touch with Doug Maass and his Got Maples? Make Syrup! business, call 914-631-7541 or e-mail him at doug@maass.org.