We strongly recommend foraging with someone experienced, or looking at pictures and descriptions from several online or printed resources to be sure of identification before harvesting and eating. Bluebird Forest Garden and the author of this content assume no liability for improper identification of wild foods.
Tapping of trees for their saps is a spring-time ritual in many areas. The Native Americans would carve little hollows in the trunks of certain trees and go back in a few days to collect the sap that had accumulated. Europeans used hollow pegs pounded into round holes drilled in the trees. The sap runs through the hollow peg and drips into a bucket hung around the tree. I drill a small hole in the tree with a bit-and-brace, insert a home-made service berry wood spout and hang a glass jar around the tree. The trunk does not need to be large — I’ve gotten quite a bit of sap out of a maple bush two inches in diameter. I empty the jar every evening so the jars don’t burst when it freezes at night.
Good weather for the sap run is dry, clear, with warm days and frosty nights. Mid February is usually the right time in this part of Idaho. The sap should be boiled before consumption to eliminate laxative effects. It can be boiled to a thick syrup or reduced even further to a candy or sugar. Boiling should be done outside, since it can leave a sticky residue wherever the steam lands. Here are some trees that can be tapped. So far I have only used Mountain Maple. Drilling the holes does not seem to injure the trees, but still I usually only tap half of the trunks in a particular maple bush.
Birch This is a family of native trees that can be tapped for their sap using the method described in the above video about tapping maple trees. Birches generally have smooth bark, grey or white depending on the species, and put out dangling catkins in the early spring that look like pipe cleaners, three to four inches long.
Fir and pine pitch, spruce gum This would be the dried sap of these evergreens that oozes out of wounds in the tree, or through cracks in the bark. It can be chewed for the carbohydrate and mineral content. The fir pitch I’ve eaten is quite bitter, but that is usually a sign of high mineral content.
Larch This sap can be quite laxative, so consume with caution. I’ve read that the Native Americans would carve a little hollow in the tall, straight trunks of these coniferous trees to allow the sap to collect in the spring and then spoon it out. Larch is unique among conifers in that it looses its needles in the fall, so at the early springtime of tapping, it will be bare of foliage, making it pretty easy to identify.
Mountain Maple This is the native tree on my property that’s abundant enough to tap. This year (2020) I tapped 40 trunks and I’ve gotten a gallon of sap a day on a good day. One gallon will boil down to about 1/4 cup of syrup. For immediate use, I bring the sap to a boil to reduce the laxative qualities and then cook my oatmeal in the sap. In that sugar concentration it’s just right to sweeten a bowl of oatmeal. One way to help identify a maple in the winter is if you can find a seed with the ‘whirly gig’ left over from the fall season.
Ponderosa Pine Cambium This was an important source of springtime carbohydrates for several Native Tribes, until the practice of striping the cambium was prohibited by white settlers, not to save the life of the tree, but to preserve the commercial timber value for the logging industry that did kill the trees. If the pink cambium layer (which is the vital growth layer of a tree trunk or branch) is stripped off in narrow, vertical strips, the tree can easily grow over the wound in a few years. If the cambium is stripped of in a horizontal band all the way around the tree, the tree will probably die. The natives obviously knew how to harvest without killing the tree, but since the bark of this pine is so thick, I have not yet tried to harvest any cambium. I’ve heard it is good cut into chunks and fried.
Walnut Black walnuts are the native walnut in North America, but we also have quite a few of the European variety around here. All walnuts be tapped in the spring and their sap is even more prized than maple! If you find rough, black, round walnuts lying under a tree in early spring it’s a black walnut tree. The European kind have smoother bark and you are more apt to find fragments of the nut shells under the trees, as the squirrels really go after them!