Leaves everywhere; maple syrup planning

The view from the bathroom window, upstairs.

Leaves are everywhere.  I feel blessed to live in a part of the world that puts on this gaudy but spectacular display every fall.  It's beautiful enough to give a person pause when stepping outside in the morning.

Making maple syrup this spring was such a wild success (in spite of warping our oven racks and setting my bangs on fire) that we're now seeing maple trees everywhere we look this fall.  I never noticed them before but now that we know what they can do we see them everywhere.  It must have been such a welcome source of sweetness and calories to our ancestors and now they're just growing out there, in plain sight, with mostly everyone ignoring them.  We have at least 6 maple trees on the property big enough to tap, in theory anyway.  I set out this week to identify them.

I needed to call out backup in the form of some of our much more tree-wise friends but basically what we concurred is that we have 1 sugar maple tree and the rest are red maples.  The yellow leaf on the bottom left above is the sugar maple.

Elderly red maple in the front yard.

Closest to the garage is the sugar maple.  Closest to the road is another red maple which I tried to tap last spring and could not find any live wood in the trunk.  Bad news, I know.  The other tree that I tapped is a red maple out by the swings and trampoline.

These two are in the center of the property, more red maples, but as they both have poison ivy growing up them we'll not tap them.  

We've been doing a lot of this; raking the leaves into a big pile at the bottom of the slide and sending the kids down it.  It's been fun and has resulted in a lot of surprise! leaves inside clothing at bedtime.