While there is a very strong localvore movement here in Vermont, we can protect a lot more forest by selling to export markets than we can by selling in the farmers markets.

In the export market, the big competition is the Canadians, who spend quite a bit of money marketing their syrup worldwide, largely as a single trading cooperative. Their marketing can sometimes sound as though they are talking down the maple syrup produced in the U.S. Speaking to several prospective Asian clients over the last year, as I have, you definitely get the impression that they’re being told frequently about the “unique” qualities of Canadian syrup.

I figure the best answer to that is sending barrels of maple syrup overseas so that people can see for themselves. We produced a brochure for international clients that can be seen here.

In South Korea, there has long been a market for maple sap, rather than maple syrup. They call the sap gorosoe. Sap, however, is impractical to transport half-way across the world, as it requires storage systems similar to those required by milk. Once it’s concentrated into maple syrup, it is sufficiently stable to ship. Reconstituting sap from syrup (adding water) can be done, but it will contain the diluted maple flavor of maple syrup. Uncooked sap does not.

Two taps in one stain zone. Why?

Being the skeptical sort, we’re taking 30 or 40 trees and double-tapping them so that we can see if indeed the valved sap adapters do continue to throw sap later into the season.

To set up this experiment, we’re tapping both spiles one right above the other. This won’t necessarily tell us how much sap each one produces, but it should tell us the period during which one sap is more active than another. If the current research bears out, the older taps will stop a week or so before the adapter-equipped ones. We placed the taps atop one another so as to minimize the staining done with the two holes. The sapwood stains in a largely vertical pattern (a couple feet above and below the hole), so this configuration of tapping should minimize additional damage to the tree. It also eliminates aspect as a factor affecting the timing of the tapholes drying.

Stay tuned, and we’ll have a decent anecdotal indication of effectiveness. Incidentally this should be biased toward the new valved sap adapters because our older taps are generally a couple years old, so they should be harboring the microorganisms that cause taphole drying.

Like Matchsticks

As it is, I spent some time up in our main bush today, cleaning lines and making sure things look pretty for the seasonal neighbor who comes in August. This is how I discovered that a couple weeks ago there must have been an enormous wind event. I found about 20 or 30 big maples twisted up and toppled in a fairly small area. The trees were pushed over, pivoting on uprooted root balls in a northeasterly direction, which is odd. These trees are sheltered from northeasterlies from Cooks Hill behind them. These are precisely the trees I would have expected would be protected from winds from that direction.

Root Balls Came Right Over

It’s pretty much a mess that’ll take something close to a man-week to clear out – not what your expecting wife wants to hear at T-minus 30. I’ll be taking a trip up there with the big Jonsered saw tomorrow, perhaps make a dent in it.

Border Collie Fetching Sue's Xmas Tree Just Prior to Easement

The easement also included a good deal of flexibility for making maple syrup or other serious agricultural pursuits on the property, which means that over generations, a wider population can own and steward this property, allowing it to pay for itself in a sustainable fashion. We feel very, very priviledged to be the next couple to help protect the property. Working a piece of land like this for maple syrup quickly allows it to work into your blood. We are all lucky that in Vermont there are many Sue Bakers out there keeping the state green.

Running lines this time of year exposes you to the most beautiful views that don’t make Vermont Life magazine. Images of towering cloud systems moving too fast between close hills, trees losing large portions of their leaves all in a moment with the first strong gust of the fall. If gray days sold tourism, you’d see all of this on the postcards streaming from Vermont, but they don’t. These days are for farmers and maple syrup makers.

Coming down I-91 and turning into the Thetford exit, I turned away from home, heading up Five Corners Road where some friends of mine once lived, where I knew they had a view of my maple syrup operation. I needed the distance view to contemplate where the maples are, and where the topography is, and where that happy combination can marry them together, letting me use that line I’m hauling to carry maple syrup sap down to where we can collect it in March.

I set in my rig for a minute or two looking at this view. This time of year is one of a couple where you can tell the maples from the rest of the forest because they turn more quickly, and to a distinctive yellow. It’s a great scouting technique, and makes for a great excuse to do some productive driving around town in the turn of the fall, figuring out who might own some unused maples the rights to which might be prized free with some well placed maple syrup.

I have not yet met the man who bought the house of my friends, and I realize it must look odd, were someone to see me, looking past his home on the side of the road off into space.

The man who farms across the street from this house is a friend of mine. He, it turns out, helped make maple syrup some 50 or 60 years ago on the same bush I sugar, driving horses uphill to the old sugar shack on top. He makes maple syrup nowadays from the trees along this road. My friends who once lived here across from him told me the story of when they made the mistake of mentioning to this sugarmaker that his new sugarlines didn’t quite have the same character that the buckets once did with their “plinks” and “planks” as the afternoon droplets fell into the galvanized steel pails. They were mortified to see that the next day he’d replaced his new lines with the old buckets by their house, just for them. It’s that sort of place still.

A group of bowhunters looks to be eying me from where the trees meet the field. I start the rig and move on, as they probably think that I’m scouting that eight-pointer they didn’t get last year (and won’t get this year). I can’t fool with deer because I’m a fool for the maple syrup, but that’s not comfort for them.

In the first half of the 20th Century, a fellow named Jessie Messier made maple syrup here in a sugar house between the two peaks of Cooks Hill. This is that sugar shack pictured below, standing mutely as I climb the ridges to either side of it, up and down and then up and down again running the lateral line.

Just within five or ten years ago another fellow owned the land and sugared the side closest to the road, but not these trees. He definitely had ambitions of running line way the heck out here; you can tell from the way he set up the dendrology of his line system. To get this sap down to the sugarhouse, we’ll have to run a mainline across a little corner of a neighboring property, but the nice woman who owns that wood lot to the north thankfully thought the idea a good one.

I estimated 250 trees at first in this back section of the lot. After scouting it a few extra times with my brittanys, I figured maybe as many as 350. I’m about half-way done now, and I’ve run line past 341 trees. If it goes past 600 maple trees, I’ll have to go buy more line. It’ll be quite an addition to the main sugarbush, especially as I’ll be able to run it on down to the sugar shack and the vacuum system we have hooked up there.

And we also managed to score some of the new, experimental purge valve tap doohickies out of Proctor Maple Research Center. It’ll be interesting to see if they live up (or down) to the expectations people have of them.

There are two other yet-to-be-tapped sections on the property. Those two might together provide another 1,500 trees, but the topography is such that gravity will never bring it back up to the main sugarhouse by the road. We’d have to run a half mile of mainline down through a couple neighboring properties and stick a tank down by Sawnee Bean, pumping it into some sort of transfer vehicle once or twice a day. With that many trees it’ll be worth it, but that will be quite a bit of effort to get that up and going. Probably next year. Already got it mapped out and the neighbors on board. Once that happens, it’s hard to let the idea sit.

We’re still cleaning lines, as usual taking us a lot longer than we thought. It’s enjoyable, though. Lots of critters coming out of the woodwork. The porcupine my wife calls “Humbledy” keeps a respectful distance, but is often seen waddling away. The frogs have set up their choruses, and we even went out late at night to catch them and other animals at their most active.

Here is a picture of a peeper peeping. It’s actually very, very hard to figure out where they are, even as they’re peeping right in front of you. Very frustrating, but Ellie was able to point out this one.

That same night, we witnessed the strangest noises – one being a bull moose call we hadn’t heard before, and the other (identifiable only after searching around on the internet for some time) was a haunting beaver call. Here is a link to the moose call, with a researcher making the bugling in the beginning, and the funny whipsaw sounds being the response that we heard out in the woods. When you get to this page, click on the “Researcher calling a bull moose” link. And here is the beaver noise , that we had so much trouble identifying. It was so lilting and uncertain, we’d assumed it was a bird.

This is the beavers’ dam, one of about seven in a series that cause a head of water roughly 25 to 30 feet above the natural pond.

We were here at night with flashlights, mostly looking for amphibians like salamanders. One of the beavers shadowed us for a couple hours, slapping his tale every five minutes or so. At one point I actually got splashed.

The quick answer: you do remove them. Despite a period a few decades ago when it was thought that best practice was to plug the holes, we now have a lot of data to show that the least rot and disease vectoring occurs when we leave the holes open. It appears that the trees’ natural defense mechanisms work pretty well on small wounds like a tap hole, while a plugged tap hole tends to be a collection point for moisture, which makes it a nice home for fungus and rot. (Just to be paranoid, I drill my tap holes at an upward angle, so that when they’re left open after the season, they won’t act as little reservoirs.)

By the way, making two gallons of maple syrup off of two trees is fantastic. A single bucket tree typically makes roughly a quart of maple syrup. Multi-bucket trees do not get proportionately higher amounts of maple syrup, although they do get more syrup. To get a full gallon per tree is quite a thing. Just in case that maple syrup is a little thinner than 67 or 68 percent solids, you might want to be careful about letting it sit too long where it might turn. Maple syrup of even slightly lower concentration can go to vinegar if left out of the fridge.

There is a disease going around the bat populations, called the white nose fungus. It causes bats to, among other things, leave their temperature-save hibernation places early, causing them to use up their calories and essentially starve before the weather gets warm enough for them to hoover up enough bugs to keep going.

This picture is of a bat trying to catch some Zs on the side of Thetford Town Hall, right by the door. He’s been there a bunch of days, and we’ve had nights below 10 degrees, so I suspect he’s not going to make it.

[We are not rapping]

Our water pipes froze underground over the winter, so we called up our local plumber, Dave Hauger. Rumor had it that he’d home-made a special device that would snake down a water pipe, emitting hot water along the way to melt the barrier. He arrived and set up what we quickly called the “Hauger Auger” and set to work.

[Dave and his "Hauger Auger," along with Bone behind him conducting a maple syrup prayer]

Meanwhile, up in the woods, Ellie sought out, and found, vacuum leaks in the Hubbard Hill bush. She took these shots, the one above being a nice shot of the east face of Hubbard Hill, which very clearly wants to grow maple. The one below is of the tracks of a little critter sidling up to a pole-size sugar maple and then attempting to girdle it by eating the bark around the base. This is one of the two main reasons it’s tough to regenerate sugar maple in these woods, the others being the profusion of whitetail deer.

Tonight, we boil.