Kris Dulmer of Salt City Syrup is practicing a version of urban farming, making syrup from tree sap.
"Currently I have about 450 maple taps of which 155 are sugar maple and roughly 350 are Norway maple and a hundred black walnut taps and 24 butternut taps so roughly about 600 taps," Dulmer said.
All of those taps are on trees inside the Syracuse city limits.
"I guess finding the trees was not the hard part. I’m constantly scanning the hillsides for trees everywhere I go so I knew where the trees were so it was just a matter of getting the permissions for all of them," Dulmer said.
And that turned out to be fairly easy.
"I didn’t run into one person who wasn’t willing to let us tap the trees and everyone seems very happy about it and they get syrup, of course, at the end of the season," Dulmer said.
Tapping Norway maples isn’t as productive as sugar maples. It takes 100 gallons of sap to produce a gallon of syrup while sugar maple trees take less than half that much sap.
So it’s not an ideal situation but living here in the city I take what I can get and it’s kind of fun to produce another syrup from a different tree species.
Plus experimenting with species like 80 black walnut trees using a vacuum collection system and the traditional bucket system on a dozen butternut trees.
I created a variety pack where I have a sample of all four different tree species of syrup and it’s a great way to get the different traits of each syrup.