How to Tap Birch Tree Sap - Bushcraft tutorial

so we're into March now and the Sun has really got some heat to it the hedges have already started a burst and we've got some flowers showing through we've got some selling beans poking their heads through and it's that magical time of the year when the SAP starts to flow in the trees so some of the first trees that are noticeable the saps running in are the silver birch so these silver birch we planted myself and Louis how many years ago so he put a lot of these trees in the ground and this magnificent birch has probably got a good 9 or 10 inches at the base now and it's it's that amazing time where we can actually start to harvest either the timber for different uses but in this instance we were actually going to harvest some of the Sun so first thing we want to do is actually see if the sap is flowing in that tree so the easiest way to do that is to actually use your knife so come down here you want to probably go about two feet up up the stem of the tree so not right near the base and then I'm gonna just use the tip of my knife I'm gonna place it at a slight angle and then I'm gonna to carefully draw that in just by hitting the back edge of the knife like that the bud and then if all is well and as we withdraw our knife we will start to see some of the SAP starting to flow you can already see that there's a good deal of SAP already running out of that tree now I tend to do that first of all with a knife because I want to just check that the saps flowing before I do anything more major to it now obviously we planted these trees and they're on our property so we can do what we like with them I'm not saying that you should go out into a public space and start stabbing or drilling birch trees just to gather the SAP obviously find out who owns them and get permission and what we're gonna do he's not going to damage the tree long term but now that I've assessed that we've got that SAP flowing we can get some other tools out and because we're gonna gather quite a lot of SAP rather than just sticking a stick in there and a little Billy can underneath it we're gonna use a drill to make it slightly so it for a brace - this a little Walker and then we've also got a little bit of point for this now the auger itself I try and choose the smallest drill bit that we can in order to get the sap from the tree but do as little damage as possible so the pipe that I've got here is 10 mil in diameter so it's brought 10 mil all go with us and I'll keep the end protected by just keeping it in a little cork so do you want to pop that in the brace for a slice I'm gonna put the drill in just where Finn's made the little slip you could already see it's already flowing nicely there and this just leaves less damage if we do it in the same place just need to break into that basically into that cambium layer and make sure that the air is fairly ends fairly clean and you've got a nice clean cut and you can already start to see it welling up in the back there that hole so squeeze that in and it's good that it's a really tight fit because you don't want to lose any of that SAP on the outside running down the tree and look you can see it running already so I tend to leave this long until I know roughly where we've drilled the hole and then we want to cut it off so again cut it off with a nice clean cut and we should get a few more trees tapped with and use this extra bit of pipe there so now a few times that I've done it you prop it up like that and then something walks past a rabbit or whatever and knocks it over so to make that stable the easiest way to do it it's actually just picking in place with a couple of sticks I've got some sticks and we'll see if they were sticking to this nice soft ground hopefully not hit too many roots it's so disappointing when you come back in your bottles falling over it's good just to make sure that it's not going to go anyway those pesky wabbit yeah so we're going to leave that now for about well between 6 hours and 24 hours depends out quickly that setups flowing what we've found is ones on the edge of a woodland will give out earlier than the ones in the middle of a woodland they're getting more sunlight and a bit more heat so this is dripping nicely so should we go check out their tree we did oh yeah let's see how that's doing brilliant [Music] fantastic so this has been going for about five hours or so as you can see it's it's nearly full so this has been a really good treat we'll let that fill up a little bit more while we show you another little method of getting some birch sap from a tree a simpler method so this is another birch that we've actually drilled and we've got running into a bottle down below we've shown you that you can obviously do the drilling method to gather a lot of SAP or if you're only doing a little bit you can just stick your knife in and put a little stick and that can run into your billy cap obviously they're all quite sort of invasive to the actual tree itself so one of the noises that sort of most sympathetic ways of doing it is to actually use a branch itself so what I'll do is I'll bend this down and what you can do obviously the sap is gonna be flowing along the whole tree but by bending this twig down this branch we can actually get that your SAP that's flowing up the stem to then drip down into a container so what you might have to do is just put a piece of string to tie it back to create that arc and all I'll do is I'll snip one of these ends off and we can tie a bottle on to it there so if you've got have you got their string [Music] oh you could feel the whole tree moving then in the wind beautiful great and then what would do and then I'm probably gonna take this is major stem off this branch probably gonna get trimmed off anyway because it's near the path so if I cut that end off it might be a little bit slower because obviously it's a bit further up there up the tree itself but after a few minutes you'll probably find that that will start to go moist and it will stop running out the same so then what we can do can get that Billy can out for Stice it's a little bit slower because obviously this is further up the trunk but seems like it's got a little bit of moisture on there now so we'll come back and see what that's doing in a few hours that's gonna work well okay so we leave that for a bit you're going try some lasat right let's drink cheers Cheers so there's different levels of sweetness depending on what how long the tree is what the soil that the trees living in so some of it might just taste like water and some will taste real sweet what you've got to imagine is that those roots of the tree are drawing up essential minerals out of the ground and they're going to be in that that drink so it's sort of like a real spring tonic and it's just something fantastic about it so yeah as Louis says it's something fantastic about drinking this SAP we've got through the dark nights of winter and it's like you're drinking spring itself the great thing about drinking sap from a tree like this you know that basically you're drinking something that's been purified so you haven't got to worry about drinking any kind of contaminated water and things like that so it's perfectly safe to drink the other thing that you can do with it is obviously you can then take that SAP and you can make wine from it if you ferment it you can make syrup if you boil lots of it down we just like to sort of drink it out in the woods but yeah it's a real nice spring tonic so if you've drilled a hole in the tree to gather your SAP and you're finished with it remember that we want to see all that hole so remove your pipe and then go and cut a fresh living piece of Tim I don't use it dead easy timber off the floor because that's all you're gonna have fungus and things in it and then we just want to wit all that it's bit try and keep sort of facets to it so that it will bite into the tree itself and stay wedged in there you try that for fit shun for that in just a little bit and then I'm gonna hammer that in and then saw that off just like so should stop the SAP flowing and then in a few weeks time I cut that flush and the tree will pretty much heal over that so I hope you've enjoyed that as much as we have and hopefully it's given you enough information to get out into the woods and maybe try some birch stuff if you've never tried it before so thanks for watching and more sail what

Channel: Ben & Lois Orford

Views: 126,661

Keywords: bushcraft, survival, birch trees, birch, silver birch, tap, tapping, extract, trees, birch drink, craft, outdoors, spring

Id: BHA1Z3qRIPk

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020