Maple Thoughts, Part 2

By BECKY NELSON
Bramblngs
This past week suer proved that winter isn’t over. Despite the seed catalogs, pool installation ads and shirtsleeve weather of a couple of weeks ago, winter is holding on pretty tight. The sugarhouse has been pretty busy for the last couple of weeks, which always makes us think about spring. There is a misconception that when sap starts to flow, spring begins. We are actually in the last stages of winter, which can last quite a spell. Sugaring ends when spring arrives. The warm days and pop of the buds into baby leaves change the sap from a sweet, sugary delight to a bitter starch and the season and winter end.

So winter is still here. Some of the heaviest snowstorms I remember came in March. I remember about 15 or 20 years ago trying to dig out of an almost 3-foot mess of snow. We had a doozy of a snowstorm and my father and I were trying to dig though the drifts in the front yard of the farm when a logger who was working on the property noticed our plight and came to plow out a hole through the driveway with his log skidder. Those are tough to handle and take a long time to shovel, plow and melt our way through.

We have spent the last six weeks working in the sugar maple woods. A couple of weeks into January each year we start checking our maple tubing lines for damage from falling limbs and trees, squirrels who love to chew, an occasional porcupine chew or two and lines popped or downed by deer traveling through. This year, we had some additional work to do as we had taken down a portion of the tubing lines when we had loggers take some pine out of the sugar lot. The pine was competing with the maples for sunlight and was at the peak of maturity and best quality for harvest, so it was well worth the additional work to take down and then restore the tubing lines.

Here at the farm, we tap just over 4,000 taps (we just finished tapping so have the final tally after adding a brand new section). We have come a long way from the four or five tin sap buckets that we hung on a row of maples by the barn when I was a kid. We used to gather the buckets full of sap when we did the barn chores with my dad and pour the sweet water into milk cans to transport to the house. Once there, my mom would pour as much as she could into a stove-top canner and start boiling. Our house would become a sugarhouse. The sticky steam would coat the woodwork with a slightly sticky mess. The wallpaper in rooms close to the kitchen would sometimes start to peel away. When the pot started to boil down, mom would add some more sap and the resulting syrup at the end of a boil would be about the color of the darkest midnight. It sure tasted good, though.

We didn’t make any maple syrup at the farm in my late teen and college years that I know of. It was a hard chore to do in the house and harder work to repair the interior damage than it was worth. When my husband and I came into the picture to turn the farm in different directions, we decided that it was worth making syrup once again. We resurrected the old antique front plate of the maple “arch” that had been rusting away in the old sugarhouse that my father and his friends had boiled in some 40 years prior. The old beauty had been repaired on a few occasions and the repairs still work today.

We bought new syrup pans with raised flues in the back that channel the heat of the wood fire and create a greater surface area to boil the sap more quickly than the old flat pans had done “in the day.” We began tapping with just a few buckets for show but used tubing from the very start. We later added a vacuum system to help pull the sap to the sugarhouse and added more taps each year; sometimes just a handful; sometimes more than 100. We kept modernizing and improving and then started improving the sugar woods. We are pleased with the progress made in the sugar endeavor. We have enjoyed several good boiling days this week and last and are looking forward to more. There is nothing like watching the steam rise and swirl above the pans of boiling sap or the taste of maple syrup hot out of the pans. Sugaring is wonderful work. I am lucky to love what I do for a living.

Cold nights in the mid to high 20s and warm days in the low to mid 40s with some sunshine and a nice west wind are ideal for making the “liquid gold”. Atmospheric pressure, clouds, too much warmth, too little warmth and the occurrence of snow or rain all affect sap flow. The extended forecast looks promising, however. The old adage of “make hay when the sun shines” could very well be “make syrup when the weather cooperates”. Like all other farm endeavors, the production of maple syrup is completely weather dependent. We are looking for fair skies and pleasant weather. I bet you are, too.

Becky is co-owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport. She can be reached at [email protected]