Birch Sap Harvest

Birch sap tastes like water plus, very slightly sweet with an edge of greeness. It’s supposed to be full of minerals. Whatever it is that buds and leaves need to grow, it’s in that liquid.
One year I harvested about 25 litres and made wine, substituting the birch sap for water in the recipe.  It tasted good, but then wine usually does taste good.
You drill a hole about 3 cm into in the tree, sloping slightly upward. It has to be big enough for the rubber or plastic pipe.  Push the pipe about a cm in and fix it in place with bluetack or cotton wool. (The compressed cotton wool stops the sap leaking out around your pipe.)
Hang your bottle in a suitable place and collect. If the sap is running fast then you need to empty the bottle every 3 hours or so, which is slightly inconvenient in the night! Tomorrow I’ll be buying a 5 litre plastic container.
Important - when you are done remove the pipe and fill the hole with a cork or something similar. In this way you don’t damage the tree or allow disease to creep in.
When are you done? When you ave enough or the sap is no longer running.  Devotees fill a whole freezer with small plastic bottles of the sap and drink it all through the year. I’m not that enamoured so we’ll see how much we get.
The extra shows JanHar, at the end of a heroic weekend.  The two rooms were both completely full of piles of boxes, and I was off-colour enough not to be much help. Jan blipped the smaller room so I took this one as an extra. The woman works miracles!