Why Tapping Maple Trees Should Belong only to the Professionals

It's maple season time at Spoiled Rotten B&B  and I thought I'd jump on the band wagon.  Never was a thought more in error. The longer I am an innkeeper, and the more things I attempt, the more I realize how bad I am at certain things but I'm a disaster at mapling.  Yes, that is a new word.  I have exactly one tree and attempted to tap it last year.  I got a meager amount of sap and called it a day.  My friend Jon reminded me how wonderful it would be for me to have fresh maple syrup for my guests and I must admit, I got caught up in the whimsy of it all.  Forget that I'm drowning in paperwork and budgets and year ends....how long could it take to tap a simple tree and collect two jugs of sap a day, then boil them down and whatever else it all entailed?  Why, I even researched the best way to tap my tree and bought all the props, bells and whistles even though they are sold in lots of 20 and I only have one tree.  As most of my flights of fancy have turned out, I should not have bought anything or tried it again.  One flop was enough.  

Let's start with I love trees.  To take a drill and drill into the trunk for inches, well, quite honestly, it broke my heart and pained me to the core. I could hear her cry.  Unfortunately, I inserted the tap on a warm day and then it turned really cold and nothing happened.  On the first warm day, I was so excited to bottle up enough to sell and get wealthy from this get rich scheme but not a drop.  The next day, same thing, except for one tiny change.  The small tap I had used the previous year was dripping on the north side of my tree.  The massive wound I had inflicted on the sunny side of the tree was hemorrhaging tears of sadness.  The tree was soaked but nowhere near my drilled hole.  I researched how to fix it and Dr Google Death said to "put a cork in it", literally, and the next article said never do that.  You are putting a foreign substance in the wound and it will get infected.  Leave the attempted murder alone and it will heal itself.  The original person who encouraged me to just keep tapping; well I have his number.  He just wants all my trees to die and he alone will own the forest.  

A small part of me wants to try this one more time.  A small part wants to take the wine cork and stuff the hole.  All the voices in my head are telling me to stop.  You don't have time for this.   I have no idea what to do so I will do nothing and just keep getting my syrup the old fashioned way... from the grocery store.