As we close down and clean up from the less-than-stellar maple season, I am reflecting on life a mere five years ago. I read some of my Bramblings the other day, trying to find some inspirational words from another year of great turbulence and uncertainty. It seems we had a mediocre season in 2020, just as the COVID pandemic was about to turn our lives upside down and inside out. We actually made about 50 more gallons than we made this spring, but I hold hope even in the decrease. Our maple equipment project ran very close to production time, and we missed the first couple of boils as we finished up installing equipment and ran late tapping trees. The weather was terrible for us this spring as well, with our beloved maple trees only giving us six boil dates. This, even though concerning as we look for a dozen or more boil times, was encouraging in itself as the new equipment allowed us to make more syrup at each evaporation day. We think we lost a lot of sugar into the rafters on the old equipment. We are hopeful about next year.
The end of the maple season is always bittersweet. The many long hours building up to the actual production of the sweet, sticky syrup always seem well worth the effort as the batches come off the evaporator and the jugs and barrels fill. Syrup has a very long history here at the farm with production from the sap of maples taking place through the centuries here on the same turf. Many of the maples were lost to the hurricane of 1938, which laid waste to vast swaths of trees here at the farm and all across New England. At the same time we were upgrading our evaporation equipment to the latest state of the art models to make our process more efficient, we also were working in the woods to make the growth of our trees more efficient.
We instituted a formal forest management plan when we put the farm and forestland into the protective shell of a conservation easement about six years ago. We have been working to cull some invasive species to improve forest health, and this year culled trees competing with each other following less healthy harvests performed almost a century ago, working toward the future of our forests by promoting new growth, providing wildlife habitat in sections and improving our stand of maples toward future production to ensure income from the forestland in the future.
It has been and continues to be a lot of work to keep the forests healthy. It gives me hope for the next years and years to come. I read somewhere a theory that trees actually talk to one another through their root systems. This wouldn’t surprise me, as I think that all living things actually communicate with one another and our “baby” trees talk with their great grandmothers through the intricate network of roots.
Ending the maple season and thinking of the next is like flipping the pages of a book and turning to a new chapter. We finished the syrup production just last week and are already now pruning apples, raspberries and blueberries to prepare for the next farm season. This, too, gives us hope for the future of the farm. The current trade war, the messy political scene, the worry and fear of changes to our lives and livelihood, all are very real right now as well. If I could communicate with my great-grandmother like the trees their elders through their roots, I think I would find many of the fears of today as fears of yesterday, but I would also find the hopes and dreams that have led to our family tapping the same trees and working the same soil, working toward a better tomorrow.
Keep the hope. Keep working. Keep the dreams and tomorrows alive.
