MILKING a TREE!?! | Maple SUGAR on OPEN FIRE | Home Made Evaporator, Wood Boiler, Chickens, Gardens

that's nine pounds of sugar i extracted out of a tree find out how I did it in this video hey guys how's it going so I'm here with Holden you wanted him to come back and do another video so here we are we're gonna do some maple we're gonna start some maple syrup SAP deal I'm gonna show you the materials that we're using basically it's a I like the traditional spoils metals pile it's basically got a slit at the back you tap that into the tree after you make a hole and we're gonna rig it on to the tree with just a little nail here they do sell buckets specially made for doing maple sap I don't particularly like them because they're expensive and these ones I can get for free at the grocery store so basically I go to the bakery section and though sometimes if you're lucky we'll have a bunch of empty pails wash those out so you drill a little hole on the side here with a spade bit punch through that and then what you're gonna do is hang it onto the tree like so through your hole punch it in and then use the nail on the inside to hold it in so for that so we've got Spile the nail right and hammer hammer to tap the Spile into the tree you don't have to go in super far into the tree but far enough just to hold this on I find actually that this file tapped into the trees is good enough to hold an entire bucket full the next thing we do is wait it'll take probably two two days or so to fill up a bucket like that if it's on a good run it might take a day yeah so we're gonna do I think we have about twenty buckets to do twenty to forty buckets someone there somebody about thirty you do want to make sure that when you get your buckets you keep the lids you don't want these to fill up with rainwater because that's gonna make it your your solution a lot more dilute the ratio we're looking at is about forty to one so forty pails of sap will boil down to one pail of maple syrup that's about the ratio that you have going so you can if you want to make a lot of syrup you need a lot of SAP my idea this time is I'm going to do one big boil if I can the temperatures are such that it SAP will run at any temperature above zero degrees if it doesn't go below zero at night means it won't flow the next day so the and the greater the differential between night and day the greater the flow so obviously you want warm days and cold nights and then if it becomes such that the temperature doesn't fluctuate between cold and warm or hour below freezing and above freezing the SAP stops flowing and there becomes a time where later on in the season the SAP becomes more bitter than sweet so you kind of have to talk call it quits at some point but you can get a pretty good run maybe three four weeks so let's get some going right bud all right so that's it we're gonna do a big boil after all we're gonna do is make a nice hole here and see the OL hole from last year healed over so we're just going on a sort of uphill angle so that the SAP will flow outwards you got a Spile lightly tap it in pop them in like so and then the nail is gonna fit in [Music] it's pretty nice to have a little helper I really do appreciate having my son come out help nice to have some company rather than doing like purely circle solo survive what kind of deals all the time with this isn't really so low this isnt really survival but it is more homesteading and it is something that fits into wilderness living that's for sure thanks buddy all right man what do you notice about the gut pile it's completely gone that's weird eh so I was kind of wondering what was going on with the gut pile why it was still here for so long but we had really super cold temperatures for a long time and then what happened over the last week it got a lot warmer I got a lot warmer so now the gut pile was here there was actually not one goblet to gut piles from two different goats right remember how big it was and how smelly it was it smelt really bad anyway so and you can actually see looks like there's animals like can you see like they're pulling out this - can you see that I think everything's kind of like being pulled down so it's probably some animals jumping up and trying to pull a little bit too fat off their butts it's that gut pile that was here is completely gone yeah we think this big it was too big gut piles so it's gone it's too bad I didn't have the chill camera on it but I did bring it up north with me so I guess it's going to be a mystery of what animals took it but it's just a lesson for you guys to understand that even if you don't use the whole animal nature will really consume absolutely everything and incorporating it back into nature right nothing's ever waste the waste ink waste is it is a human term mmm there's so much and you already we've just been letting a drip well we topped the other trees it's like a centimeter high probably more than that it looks like there's almost an inch in there super-sweet or just a little bit sweet a little taste like maple syrup boil it down right really put the lid back on so it's been about four days since I set these out I'm just coming to double-check see what's going on the weather as you can see is not really cooperating we're back to snow as I mentioned before the temperatures have to go above zero in order for the SAP to run so what I'm gonna do today is I'm going to collect some of the buckets that are more on the full side so they don't overflow and I'm going to get my boiling system ready to boil I have a large vat and I have some rescued bricks so we're gonna do is pop up the VAT from it's no commercial sink I believe from a restaurant we're gonna pop that up on the rocks and we're gonna make a nice enclosure so that we can feed wood in I did this system same system last year and it worked really well it's not as good as having a wider VAT with a bigger fire underneath and more surface area but it does work so for our purpose it'll do just fine and I only plan and do one big boil this year because I still have maple syrup from last year and maple sugar so for anybody you don't know this is like my actual brother Jimmy everybody thinks that Jeremy is my brother but Jim was just a buddy from high school well we look alike this is my actual brother his name's Kevin I he was asking me if I was gonna eat this inside here is a little bit of maple syrup from last year and I actually am Vineeta sweet tastes just like maple syrup it's kind of funny that maple syrup would actually last in the bottom of that container is probably not maple syrup when we left it but it had probably evaporated throughout the year just sitting as water in the heat and so most of the water evaporation what's left is maple sugar maple syrup actually so there you go and it tastes just as fresh as it was the day I we made it what's a bean nope Dean didn't want it but good stuff why bricks in the front here we'll have a little bit of a damper draft ordeal that back so the airflow all that good stuff and then I'll break up to the front as the fire gets going and seal off I eat pretty simple boiler system for us all we need so for some reason we got one that's almost three-quarters the way full but all the other ones are probably only below 2 inches well empty this one in get a good start first a collection we have the Suzuki modified for maple sap collection so this is the 1.0 version actually maybe more advanced than that it's the most efficient way to earn your calories collecting SAP truthfully we could probably just do it by hand bow you know it's actually more fun this way it's more of a family adventure so we've got maybe one-third buckets full but tomorrow is gonna be a floor was gonna be a hot day today's gonna be a hot day I mean [Applause] these are road ones a road ones are a bit more productive let's see if I can get this open with one hand it doesn't feel too full yeah there's a little bit in there about a quarter but it's like turning to ice mm-hmm we got I'll get what we got that's almost a pail out of four pails so not enough it's only the first day there are forty to one so we need 40 buckets to make one bucket of cereal this is my second year doing maple syrup last year I did a lot this year I'm not gonna do is my as much because last year was just basic experiment I was really focused on how many calories I could get from the production of maple syrup and my focus was mainly on testing whether or not it was feasible for Native American people to boil and produce calories from maple sap and to maple sugar I found that through my research especially that that wasn't the case Native Americans never actually really produced maple syrup on quantity until the arrival of the Europeans and that's not common knowledge most people think that natives were pioneers when it came to me Apple syrup and that they had produced it and collected with birch bark containers and they did but they didn't do it until Europeans really came they might have used it in stews before then but you can imagine making a stew is a difficult thing when you didn't have a cast-iron pot you know how would you boil water so a lot of historical records mentioned that they would call about logs and drop in hot rocks and that would boil away very slowly the water to produce the syrup but what you don't understand was what people don't understand is if it would be filled with ash and it'll be filled with grit to the point where you wouldn't actually want to eat it it would be sweet but you wouldn't really like it so a lot of people are have that misconception so Native Americans in actually do it de Rivel Europeans bucket and pot and they would boil it in quantity what they did was buy as part of the trade with Europeans is produce massive amounts of maple syrup because it was something that could trade for for traps for metal traps for guns ammunition etc so Native Americans never actually did it and I at least certainly not in quantity like like we presume they did so Europeans basically did it people like us and they did it because they could employ horses to pull the the carts around to collect the SAP in syrup and you know to cut the firewood they needed metal implements to cut enough firewood to burn off all that excess moisture so we're just out here doing for fun it's a great way to collect nutrients from the environment but it's more homesteading so we got probably about that much in the bottom of that container gonna collect a couple more times so that I have enough that I make sense for me to boil it takes a lot of energy to heat this thing up I'll go over that a little bit later but to get it to temperature where it starts to boil is a lot of work and it's not something I want to restart over and over again unless I had to I don't know if you guys watch the Trailer Park Boys with bubbles but this is uh this is our version of bubble so the wood ones here in the shade and shelter are not producing it only the street ones these are no produce later the good thing is that produce longer but they produce later because they're sheltered and they don't heat up as much with the Sun because they don't have to get this on as early as they do on the street [Music] [Applause] [Music] really good is it sweet yeah a little bit or mostly or not at all a little a little you guys are all cooped up in the city man you got to get out here get out in the bush and get up in the country and you know soon as I step perjures start to come up in the spring it's a good time to get out in the sun's out and you get a get your vitamin D get your fill you know after being cooped up this this year I wasn't really cooped up I did lots of trips and lots of adventure so I didn't feel like this summer there the winter dragged on a lot this year I probably got full potential of it but yeah man Kevin on the spring you know I'm just getting that Sun on you again makes you feel so much better you know we weren't meant to be indoors not at all couple years ago at my house I used to have laying hand chickens so my brother's because he's got some property out here he's making himself a little coop this will be laying hen coop here I think you'll have about 7 or 8 hens that'll produce enough eggs for him I'll be able to steal a couple eggs every once in a while and we're actually going to get meat birds - we're gonna get 5050 chicken meat birds we're gonna put them a chicken tractor up by the field here where we had our Native American garden and that'll be a good so we'll have you know like good two chickens per month so 25 chickens each Native American garden that's a work in progress we've got a beat on some cow manure so we're gonna throw some cow manure out and hear our gold manure actually from the go farmer I think and some common air possibly as well we've got a little bit of a tarp experiment working we put a lot of effort into the tarp but hopefully we can get on top of the weed situation and produce a lot more of the food that we want this year so it's a big garden and wasn't very successful last year we did get quite a bit out of it but a lot of weeds and that was that quite a bit quite a bit of work so we have to get it started once we get the system up and running we'll be fine they'll produce a lot of food we got a bunch of kindling and some scrap wood we're gonna throw in there but it's been unusually cold for for spring we haven't even had spring-like weather so since we collected we've got maybe one more collector a buddy yeah probably some of the buckets are still full after we collect all the SAP it's probably gonna be up to about here yeah it might be totally full so we got to start boiling yep the first part of the fire is always a smoky business because it's not enough heat to actually combust the wood so we've and we're getting a lot of strong winds we set up a little bit of a barricade here it's uh some foam you know junk it up redneck style and then there's a perforated other little messy bit thing talk oh yeah smoke is terrible so once you get what's that he picks up once the he picks up in there all that smoke with this face starting to you right now and then we'll have some really good heat but the biggest problem today is gonna be to get that block defrosted extra step today but it's actually kind of worked in our benefit because we've been able to collect for almost three weeks now although the flow hasn't been really good problem with maple syrup maple sap is that it only keeps for about two days or three days or four days now maybe a week I'll give it a week but the higher the temperature is the more likely it is to spoil it's like sugar water you can imagine once you open say you know bottle of Gatorade or something like that introduce a little bit of bacteria and there it it could start to spoil so you only have a certain number of days it's got a shelf life but once it turns into maple syrup you have a little bit more because it's been purified it's been sterilized so it has a longer shelf life couple of bottom monster what they what they say but I know I've kept stuff in the fridge for a year and it's fine as maple sugar it's got a probably year two years if it's probably stored probably indefinitely as a shelf-life so that's what we're aiming for us to get that indefinite shelf life of if the purified maple sugar if we get that for maple syrup at best but yeah so we're in the early stages now we're gonna get that block of ice melted which is gonna take a lot of energy it takes a lot of energy on its own just to get it to boil from a liquid my brother's a little bit of a nut for wood I can't tell he basically has a deal with the the wood cutters the tree pruners etcetera in the neighborhood oh I should say in the neighborhood we're out in the country now but you know people need the arborists work around they need arborist to cut down the trees so he does is he says okay just drop it off in my house I don't care what it is so he takes all the refuse wood that they can't deal with they just have way too much of it here I can see the pile isn't behind me all tarped off miles and miles of it and he'll work away at it over the over the winter and over the spring and summer it was up all these bays here and I'll show you so my son Hollen helping his uncle Kevin my brother unload and he's got this boiler over here he talked about homesteading so you got a boiler behind me here it's a high-efficiency one not the boils outside here and then it carries hot water into the house so that gets piped into the host heats the whole house so he's basically heating the whole house for free I mean if you don't count all the labor he puts into it which is a lot moving this wood around keeping everything going but yeah I mean if you want to save a bit of money you want to live off the grid that's one way to do it you see the truck meet some fancy modifications to a truck buy the truck for five hundred bucks you know substitute for you know a TV 500 bucks get a four-wheel-drive truck and can insure that sucker but hey there it goes some of you guys asked me in both the old suzuki well this is the old suzuki this is what it does the pickup truck and then all the wood back here a whole nother bay high everywhere wood everywhere all here piles and piles of it all back there piles piles piles upon piles wood yeah wood on fire with the Burtonwood whole back UT wood everywhere years decades somebody once you're dead and they're gonna rot you might as well take the rotting trees and burn them in order to not use fossil fuels that little box over there just hot water all the heat it's actually more efficient than airtight wood insert [Music] you think of that truck it's boiling good now so I've replaced the front door with a slab it's kind of the bricks are burning through mine it's all the time so just replace with a slab and I can open the closest lab is this we're red necking it anyway I do some hot dogs do some hot dogs redneck style one to undo it and gonna roll off yeah it's gonna roll off gonna roll off come on they're kind of dumb oh yeah that's more so good smells like candy we're just at a spot here where we cleaned our hair from our snowshoe hare snaring video and how much is left here on the ground nothing the gut pile is all gone in the head and the head the two heads in the cape the fur all gone so that was only a few days ago we did that right it's completely disappeared so when people say you know stuff goes to waste or you're not eating anything nothing goes to waste if you just don't put in the bush something's gonna eat it right yeah let's show them what Scott what we got left so here's the spa down below where most of the hair and blood fell you can see where we had the hair tied up I'll just leave that there just in case we get another animal and we had tossed the capes the heads back here and I'm sure if we went far back enough we might see where an animal crushed the heads but I don't see them right here but an animal will usually when they find something like that or scavenge something that they don't like to eat it out in the open so they do is drag it off back in the bush where they feel safe and then they'll start eating it there we're nearly through I kind of lost track of how many buckets we put in I know we started with maybe that much let's say that's about a foot or so and then we mean another fog it's really hard to tell so I'm right now I'm watching or monitoring what's happening with the SAP with a stick I just kind of measured down what I want to make sure is I don't over boil if I over boil it completely ruins the syrup what happens is it crystallizes and it starts to turn into the sugar I may actually just completely turn this in this whole batch into sugar just to see roughly how much I can get out of it it's more readily stored and I frankly I don't need any more syrup I still have quite a bit of syrup that I froze from last year so I don't need any more all I'm doing now is checking to see that it doesn't over boil what happens with the SAP is once it gets near syrup we're supposed to do is starts to froth up froth up and froth up and each time it Frost's up and getting closer to the end point so what I want to do is I want to pull it before that happens and I want to finish it on the stove I can finish it on here but it's really hard to monitor what's going on because I can't actually see what's happening and I need to visually inspect it and if I'm going to go to to sugar I need to be really really really really careful I need me be able to take it off and stir it I'll talk more about that when I get to that point well for now I think we're almost through I'm gonna boil down as much as I possibly can without risking ruining it because that'll mean far less moisture in my house they recommend not doing it in their house for that reason because it produces so much moisture and some of the sugar actually does escape ends up on the wall and it gets up you know sticky walls and all that business last night we let the SAP run on cold and what we were left with in the pale so it's not very much next up we're gonna filter what we have here we should have filtered it before we started but it was frozen block solid so you can't filter that I'm just gonna run it through a cloth here we're going to collect it in I'm gonna boil on three pots I've got one big pot here two smaller pots on all the elements we're gonna boil that down until it turns into syrup and I think actually this time I'm gonna go to sugar so it's gonna take a little while we got to get the concentration down up around like almost century ago right so we gotta boil off the rest of the water it's much easier to do it in a controlled environment such as on a stove because once it gets to the point where it's just about to sugar it can go really quickly spoil burn and it's done totally ruined no good for nothing so the illustrator is playing notes but most lot of you people are not gonna go out and collect sap and boil to make syrup so this is not like survival but I want to show you that it's not survival to do this in a survival situation to the speak or willness living scenario it's not very feasible home sitting yes but not wilderness living it's way too energy intensive make you have a fire going you have somebody sitting by a fire you have a good cast-iron pot you can supplement some of your calories with it yeah for sure you can add some sugar you know you're getting two percent sugar by volume sometimes up to four or five percent depending on the tree that's out of calories for sure if you want to use that instead of water for making a stew absolutely definitely beneficial if you want to drink it instead of water for sure but as far as making syrup and sugar it's not something that's entirely feasible and tell you how to advent of cast iron so Native Americans didn't actually do this until Europeans came and I bought the cast iron pots and pans and then they could actually boil and giant cauldrons and they had a fire going for cooking anyway so as efficient but it's but before Europeans arrived with the cast iron it was totally unfeasible to do it and then they started doing in the mass and basically what they did they did it not for calories they did it because they can trade with Europeans for things of value like more cast iron guns and ammunition etc things that made their lives actually easier to live you know in the metal traps were definitely something they were after and they treated a lot of the furs and stuff just to get more metal traps because they were far more efficient than when they were using beforehand this is why you should filter beforehand you can see all the leftover or wood particles and dirt chunks in there so before we even start to boil I in ideal conditions you would filter that out first okay so you can see just starting to froth up right now so this is timing I really have to start paying attention your maple syrup each almost finished hit the back here it's all liquidy and it'll boil like that for a few hours you can see also I'll show you over here on this side this is not the mostly liquid still not zero what happens is over time it's gonna start you see I stirred it and went back down what's gonna happen z2 go up back down up back down and say stir it so it's not there yet when it goes off and it stays off that's when you know it's finished and it's actually zero you can also do this with a thermometer and there's a set temperature which it reaches in when it's done we're not gonna do with the thermometers gonna do it by by art like craft maple syrup craftsman you can see this one the option you just started foaming up here now you're gonna start watching this now so if we can knock it down it's not ready yet no it's gonna go here we got to be careful we don't want it to overflow either we're gonna remove it from the heat a little bit turning turning this into sugar is an interesting thing because in order for it to be sugar and implies that there's zero percent water or nearly zero percent water so you have to boil all that liquid off now if it's syrup it's nearly zero percent water but what happens if you go too long is it crystallizes so it goes beyond the point where it's a liquid and starts turning into a crystal which is essentially what you're doing when you're turning it to sugar you're turning into a crystallized form and eliminating all the water so this is gonna continue to boil up and down until it's almost 1 percent done you can use a thermometer like I said we're gonna do this by eyeball and we can do this as many times as you want there's no risk here the only risk we have right now is a vernian so we can take it off the heat we could stir it around and we could see if it solidifies once it's done properly 100% of the water will be removed and it will turn into a it's really neat process and it will turn directly into a sugar right in front of our eyes it's really cool watch so this is almost at the point I would say right now that it's probably syrup you can see it's holding the bubble but I want to go over here it's holding that bubble now consistently so is this good chance right now it's finished as far as the syrup so I want to keep going with this as long as possible one at the back is almost there - what I want to do is be able to combine the whole thing take it off the heat and stir it really fast to let the rest of that moisture escape all right as you can see I've totally overfilled it I tried to combine both pots together give me some trouble here we're gonna try to get all the sugar back in the bowl we're at that point where things are a little bit of a crisis none of this is gonna go to waste I'm sure my son is gonna eat it we wanna release the rest of that moisture [Applause] not the sides down while we can before all hardens up there to goose you see that skinny wants to come out shut all that water [Applause] it doesn't completely come out it is possible to put it in a bowl overnight spread it out as you can see you didn't come up perfectly these big chunks here there's still some moisture in there all over the floor there's some moisture in there still but what I'll do is I'll take the potato masher and I'll work the way work them down and I'll just leave them exposed to the air and that'll finish it up okay so I'm done I managed a fairly big pot of sugar for all our work Andy yeah sure so most of it's a fine powder I said most of it half of its fine powder on the top like a brown sugar consistency I'll work this down some more there are some big blobs of sugar that just means there's a little bit more moisture left and kind of stuck together but I can work this down with the fork just keep pounding it down until it ends up being a fine powder but that can be used as is like that it just may not have a as long a shelf life because add a little bit of moisture now you want to try some candy sugar candy Shira stop so take a little bit of maple flavor right maple flavored candy like you would predict syrup to taste it was a candy so there you go start to finish figure good couple months ago a couple youtubers Lucas and Bennett from Wilder Life messaged me and they said they wanted to show the nice that shadows don't work like that so you just can't ask for shadow and I expect to have much of an impact what you need to do something special so I gave him a little bit of time and they came up with what I think is a really great promotion for their Channel and it explains to my viewers you guys how they were impacted by my channel so the idea is to pay it forward I've talked to several youtubers now that have a little bit bigger but one of the ones before I was anybody on YouTube was Sean woods he he actually gave me a shadow because I asked for one and so I'm paying that forward right now with the shout out to the wilder life so go check those guys out we're gonna play there a little bit after I'm through here but I also want to show it a couple other guys they've been asking for for shoutouts for a while one of them is Aaron Nelson he just lots of catch a cook fishing type videos so go check him out Riverbend longbows ray fletcher and boggy creek beast he's not super active but he did help me out quite a bit whilst the hand drill and bow drill fires and stuff like that so I would consider them to be very good YouTube friends of mine and of course I'm missing lots of people but not always mentioned Jeremy one wild crafter but those are the guys that I think deserve some support for the time being and people are always asking for shoutouts and I can't show to everybody out obviously because I'll end up being a big commercial for things that maybe you're not totally interested in and I think YouTube is kind of merit-based if you produce good content people will subscribe and watch so without further further I do let's go check out what why their life has to offer and maybe you'll give him a sub at the time of this video was filming they had 280 subs so let's see where what a shout out can do for them hey guys we are welding life I am Bennett and I'm Lucas we want to thank the real woodsman for giving us the opportunity to share our channel with his community you inspired us for making YouTube videos because we started watching your series the wilderness living challenge and if ever since never stop watching so we grabbed a camera went outside and started making our own outdoor content so that's why we created wow their life in the summer I traveled to Costa Rica which I shot tons of videos I encountered some of the most incredible animals I had a face-to-face encounter with a spectacled caiman tarantula eyelash fibers and even basilisk I saw a black bear I call the water moccasin and a green iguana and at the end a 13 feet pool shark we recently went to Uganda where we saw the lives of elephants leopards we call the Black Hills centipede and even a juvenile black mamba so we want to thank you once again for promoting our channel to your community and we hope to see some of you guys soon on our channel so as always we're out here searching for wildlife living [Music] I'm gonna bring them to school and I'm gonna share them with my class so you're gonna give those out to your friends you gonna like them properly can you walk

Channel: The Wooded Beardsman

Views: 909,169

Rating: 4.8794641 out of 5

Keywords: maple syrup, how to make maple syrup, how to make maple sap, how to collect maple sap, maple sugar, how to make maple sugar, wild edibles, maple syrup evaporator, how to make a maple syrup evaporator, maple syrup tapping, maple syrup evaporator home made, homemade evaporator, cheap home made syrup evaporator, maple syrup harvest, maple syrup on snow, maple syrup heist, maple syrup how it's made, how to make a home evaporator for maple syrup, homesteading, survival

Id: c5laCKIJrMw

Length: 40min 41sec (2441 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 06 2018