Sběr mízy - umění improvizace / Collecting Sap - Art of Improvisation, English subtitles

Collecting maple and birch sap has been the traditional activity of some nations for centuries. Today, the subsequent processing of the sap produces various food and cosmetic products. However, I perceive tree sap primarily as another source of drinking water in crisis situations. By accident or bad luck you can get into a situation where you are dehydrated without a drop of drinking water and find yourself in an unknown terrain with minimal chances to obtain drinking water. This video is about solving such situation using tree sap. Welcome. At the beginning I mentioned the maple and birch, but water can be obtained from other trees as well, for example Hornbeam - Carpinus betulus. Hornbeam is generally known to have strong and tough wood, moreover the wood binds large amount of water. Especially now in spring its trunk is virtualy soaked with water. There are two important things for harvesting tree sap. A tool and a container. If our situation is so unfavourable that we have neither of those, we will have to improvise. Taking advantage of what offers the environment it won´t be a problem to make the tool, and to make the vessel I will use a plastic bag of my snack I ate on the way before. To make sure that my sap will drip into the bag and not just run down the tree trunk, I make a wick on a napkin from the snack. In order to keep the wick sticking out off the trunk, I support it with a small twig. If the wick fell and got stuck to the trunk, it wouldn´t work properly. To make the wick we can use any absorbent material that we have at hand. For example, a piece of shirt or shoelaces. If you want to use only natural materials, you can use the old bark/bast or dry stalks of grass. So after about 3 hours I went back to check how much I gathered. The bag has a volume of 2 l ('correction, the actual volume of the bag is 1.2 l), so I guess that I collected about 1 liter of drinking water that contains various enzymes, minerals, and depending on the type of tree larger or smaller amount of sugar. The advantage of the sap over the surface water sources is that sap requires no further treatment and you can drink it straight away. After pouring the sap into a bottle, I found that I didn´t collect a liter, but only 600 ml. Taste of Hornbeam tree sap is quite pleasant. In conclusion, if you want to try this technique, I would like to ask you to choose older full-grown trees that will survive such intervention without any problems. That's all for today. Have a nice day and see you next time.