Vermont Country Journal~ 'Sugarbush'

                                                                                                      Maple Syrup Time

                                                                                                   Tapping a Maple Tree

 I guess if one were to look at it from a different angle,  the second coldest April on record has added a few weeks more to the 'sugaring' season in Vermont. Sugaring is the term given to the tradition of collecting sap from the abundant sugar maples that grow  in the northern states into Canada. It only lasts during the early months of spring when trees begin to come out of the dormant months of winter. The flowing of sap in the maple trees, though, is slowing down. In the natural progression of things, we'll be lucky if we get another full bucket before the spouts dry up until next year. Sap flows best with freezing nights and warmer sunny days.

There was speculation that this year wasn't going to be all that good for the state's production of maple syrup because of the slow start of winter weather. Some thought that the trees would get all turned around by not having the long cold months of frigidity that helps to elevate the sugar levels needed for quality maple syrup. That hasn't been the case. Freeze it did...wicked. It was around New Year's before we got plunged into the deep freeze.

Many farmers set out to tap their trees by mid-February, but my brother Lenny and I always looked at March 1st as the time to start when we were young tappers. We didn't have all of the equipment of professional producers who  have complex systems of  tubing that attach to the spouts in the holes in their trees (often numbering in the thousands) and are joined together into a pipeline that delivers sap directly into a boiling tray in a building called a sugarshack.

A maple tree is sometimes referred to as a sugarbush. Lenny and I tapped maybe five or six huge ancient maples that had stood for centuries along the road into town in front of where we lived. All we used was a hand drill and buckets with handles. We whittled spouts from sumac branches. Sumacs have soft cores that are easily hallowed out with a red hot wire. We had five or six buckets hanging off of each tree, which produced more sap than we could ever boil off on our kitchen stove. It takes about forty gallons of sap to produce a gallon of syrup- that's at least thirty nine extra gallons of water vapor that pervaded the atmosphere of the small 'mobile home' that our dear Mother had moved us all in to.

'Sugaring'- making maple syrup- at our grandmother's home could be done on any number of stoves in her house: a wood burner in the shed out the back door, a coal/wood combo in the living room, and a big old wood and gas stove in the kitchen that always had something boiling on it and was the best of them all. I'm sure it was the inspiration for boiling it down in the trailor's kitchen.

Mom was very succinct in referring to where we lived as "a mobile home- NOT a trailor". That didn't stop kids and friends from teasing us that we lived in a 'trailor camp'. Think Mom must have had an affinity with Lucille Ball or something in her 1950's/60's dream of mobility. Streamlined, modern and more easy to clean than the Victorian farmhouses she grew up in. So she moved all eight of us into a 60' X 12' house with wheels. It did have a ten foot extension off of the living room, three bedrooms, tiny dining nook, and a small kitchen with an electric stove that she let Lenny and myself boil our sap on. For that- she was a saint. The scent of  sweet humid boiling maple sap stayed permanently etched in memory until...this year.

                                                                                                                    Sugarbush
 

It has been many years since Lenny's and my tree-tapping adventures. Since this is our first year back in Vermont during sugaring season, we decided to tap two of the maples along the road out front. Two trees=six spouts. We got off to a late start around the second week of March. Much of the procrastination was over the conundrum of where we could do the evaporating. The sap smell memory begat some consternation, not wanting to turn the house into a maple sauna. There is an antique wood stove in the smaller of the two barns, but neither of us thought ahead enough to check it out for fire safety during the summer months before winter's fire wood got piled in front of it. Henry the Woodchuck probably lives in it anyway. Better him than maple rats.

Our friend Adelaide offered us her Coleman camp stove, which we set up on the stone porch. It didn't work very well, because it had only a small burner and couldn't heat our evaporator pan hot enough. It would have taken forever, and with the price of gas being what it is, the production cost for a quart of maple syrup would have paid for gallons of 'store-boughten' stuff. In the end, we decided to do it the old fashioned way- on the kitchen stove.

Maple syrup is quite exquisite when it comes from your own trees and you boil it yourself. You can control the color and the concentration, which in commercial stuff would be labled "Grade A", 'Grade B', etc. It is akin to the difference between home grown fruits and vegetables and store bought. The trees were fine with the belated winter. They've produced sap with a high sugar content, which makes for the best syrup. Tree sugars, water, minerals, and amino acids give maple syrup its unique flavor. Vermont is reknown for the quality of syrup produced from sugar maples that grow throughout the state. The last two weeks of April will host several maple festivals celebrating the season's harvest. Maple products, pancake breakfasts, maple candy-making demonstrations, parades and even a 'Sap Run' marathon in St. Albans, VT are all in honor of maple syrup.

Lenny and I were never aware of hazards and all the things folks worry about nowadays. One of them was that maple syrup in those days stood a chance of containing unusually high levels of lead. Some of this comes naturally from trees absorbing it through the soil, but more dangerously it came from old metal spouts and pails. Vermonters often have a different take on issues.

Looking back and trying to remember how we did what we did, it didn't include the use of metal sap buckets and spouts shown in the top picture. We were into the age of plastic buckets, and sumac spouts worked just fine. They still do. Lenny now lives in Florida. I'm sure he's not tapping orange trees, but there are many other types that you can-if you have the mind to. Just none that holds a stick to maple.                      

Well,  thanks for reading  another tale about life in these parts in the Vermont Country Journal. We'll see you next time and leave you with a little bit of local humor:

 A cocky  Vermont Department of Highways employee stopped at a farm and talked with an old farmer. He told the farmer, "I need to inspect your farm for a possible new  road." 

The old farmer said, "OK, but don't go in that field."

The Highways employee said, "I have the authority of the State of Vermont
 to go where I want. See this card? I am allowed to go wherever I wish on farm land."

 So the old farmer went about his farm chores. Later, he heard loud screams
 and saw the Department of Highways employee running for the fence and
 close behind was the farmer's prize bull. The bull was madder than a nest full
 of hornets and the bull was gaining on the employee at every step. 

 The old farmer called out, "Show him your card!!