The old, gnarled maple alongside driveway is pumping sap, most of it sugar coating the Subaru. Garage swept and hosed. And Pax seems to be building stamina, though he likes to stop to wallow and slurp whenever he finds a leftover snow drift. Tomorrow, a bath and good brushing to help remove his luxurious winter coat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Maple Sugar Book
Helen and Scott Nearing

The Sugar Bush

Groups of maple trees, old enough to be tapped and handy enough to allow for economical sap collection, are called a bush, grove, or orchard. Without a sugar bush, no sap; without sap, no maple syrup and sugar. Anyone wishing to make a part or the whole of his living from maple-syrup production must therefore have the use of a sugar bush.

…How many maple trees does it require to constitute a bush? The answer would probably be hundreds to thousands of trees if one could answer the question at all. Buckets, rather than trees, are taken as the measure of bush size, because of the great variation in the number of buckets that can be hung per tree. It is not economically desirable to make syrup unless about five hundred buckets can be hung for each adult who proposes to take part in syrup making. The usual unit of syrup production is a family, or a family plus one or two persons hired for sugaring. Allowing for some variation, one adult can take care of about five or six hundred sap buckets — tap them, hang them, gather the sap, and boil the syrup.

… We remember one snowy spring when two of us shoveled or the better part of a week, opening a road from the sugar house up into the bush. The highly necessary road was about a quarter of a mile long, and the snow was from four to seven feet deep. Each night it snowed and drifted. When we felt that we had a passable road we got out the team and a sledload of buckets and covers. It took an hour to travel the quarter mile to the top of our road. The hill was steep. At the top one of the horses lay down and refused to get up. After trying everything else, we hitched the still-standing horse to the down horse with a tug chain, and pulled her down the hill on her back until she decided to try again. That night it snowed hard. Then the wind got up and drifted our shoveled road solid full. That was the spring we decided to put in equipment for bucket storage right up in the bush, plus a pipe system that would allow gravity flow of sap to the sugar house, thus eliminating the use of horses in any part of our sugar work.

Boiling Maple Syrup

With sufficient sap ahead in the storage tanks, with sap coming down fairly constantly through the piping system and with an inch of sap covering all the evaporator pans, fire is lighted in the arch. As the evaporator warms, the sides of the pan should be carefully gone over with a wet cloth (a pail of warming water can be set in the pan) in order to clean off the accumulated foam and scum of the last day's boiling. This should be done every day, and during the day when possible. About twenty minutes after starting the fire, if the wood is dry and of proper size, the evaporator is roaring with the steam shot up from the boiling sap.

… From one barrel of sap, consisting of thirty-two gallons, we often must boil away 97 per cent of water, leaving one gallon of finished syrup. Seasons differ, but at all times an enormous proportion of water is drawn off and shot into the air. Some sugar also goes with this ascending steam, as can be witnessed by the sugaring together of one's eyelashes and the general stickiness of one's hair and clothes at the end of a long boiling day.

… With the first boiling of the sap, and while the season is at its height, a sweet aroma is noticeable at boiling times, even at quite some distance from the sugarhouse. "A distinctly agreeable odor marks the process of maple sap evaporation, as every one can attest who has visited the primitive sugar factories which are operated in the maple-sugar industry."

… With our evaporator going full tilt we can take off a twelve quart pail of syrup every half hour, given normal general conditions. This syrup goes immediately, right off the fire, though flannel and felt strainers to ensure crystal clarity of the syrup…

…from the settling tanks the syrup can be put up hot or cold, at one's convenience. To bottle hot ensures a sterile pack, and is supposed to keep more flavor and fragrance, ward off crystallization in case it has been overboiled, and enable one to fill to the top of the container. As the syrup cools it leaves a vacuum that allows for possible later expansion in warm weather.