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.

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 Not-Very-Quaint Extractor]

Buckets and horses it ain’t. It’s a clever device, and useful in that you can calculate your sap flow by timing how frequently it extracts with its electric pump.

Tonight, visiting our rented sugar bush to see if I needed to turn off the vacuum system due to rapidly freezing conditions, I set down to first calculate the extracting times with a stopwatch.

I didn’t set this bush up. A man named Chaz did, and I came along to rent it from his family after he passed away a few years ago.

[The Sugarhouse at Chaz's Bush]

Our extractor throws about four gallons of sap at a time, so when we see it working every three minutes, we know that we’re running about 80 gallons per hour out of the forest, or about enough to make two gallons of maple syrup. The pump clicks on after 2 minutes, 56 seconds.

Just one test is often misleading, so I reset the watch to restart. Killing time, I start going through the trove of Chaz’s notes from years past. Manuals, sugar line layouts, some day-to-day notes. The notes are precious. They show how this bush’s trees interact with weather and temperature, seasons and how Chaz’s equipment – much of which I use – interacts with the sap to create light and dark maple syrup. He’s written down settings, mistakes, clever work-arounds and even occasionally how he felt.

3 minutes, 9 seconds later, I hear the extractor click the pump on. I could use another data point.

My sugaring buddy and I have been arguing back and forth about whether the season is over, or if we’re just in a dry patch for sap. I start rifling through Chaz’s notes to see when he stopped. He ended his seasons on April 14, 2, 21 and once on March 23, although the notes then indicate “burned the finish pan,” so I won’t count that one.

I hear the extractor pump turn on, so I push the lap button on the stopwatch. 3 minutes, 37 seconds that time, slowing a little.

Some of his notes are prosaic things only another maple syrup maker would find interesting, like the sugar content of his sap (high then as it is now, at about 2.5 percent), and others barely describe the drama I’m sure was involved (”March 20: Leak in flue pan”) which was probably very much like the day, almost exactly a year later, “9.5 inches of sap. Burned front pan.”

The extractor clicks on, and I push the lap button on the stopwatch. 4 minutes, 1 second this time.

In 2003, when Chaz was sick, there are blank spaces. You can see him backfilling dates with temperatures, and once writing on March 24 “Was in hospital since the 21rst.”

I didn’t see a lot of syrup quantity recorded day-to-day in that calendar. He’d put out a gallon of maple syrup one day, a few days later three gallons of maple syrup. The inconsistent boiling took a toll on the grade, with the maple syrup descending to Grade C on March 25. Chaz did a “push” the next day, putting plain water through the back of the pan to push through the remaining maple syrup before he would dump the pans, clean them and start over.

I notice the extractor has been going for a few seconds, so I reset the stopwatch. It was 4 minutes, 30 seconds. A whole lot slower now.

It took three days of boiling after that to get the sugar content back up in the pans, and the first batch of maple syrup must have been frustrating because it was Grade C again. It would have come back up after that, but the weather let Chaz down, turning cold enough to deny him sap for nine straight days, and allowing the sap he did have in his pans to sour. He cleaned again the day before the big runs on April 10 and 11, making a range of Dark Amber, B and then C again.

Those days and the three next brought Chaz 36 gallons of maple syrup, by far the most he’d ever made in such a period. The next day: “Very warm. I quit.” It was 76 degrees outside, a clear day and a night of a full moon.

5 minutes and 20 seconds had gone by. The extractor clicked on. I pocketed the timer and grabbed Chaz’s notes. There was truly a trove of useful information (that, for instance, the automatic draw off device I was contemplating using actually doesn’t work).

[Before Chaz, the Old Sugarhouse Up Atop the Hill]

I peer into the extractor’s input pane and can see that the sap lines must be freezing up. There’s little sap coming in, and the pressure gauge is steadily climbing as ice blocks major parts of the lines. I throw the switch on the wall with a satisfying “clunk,” turning off the vacuum. With some cold this evening, we’ll get some more flow tomorrow, and maybe extend our season one or two more days. It’s April 8, a full moon lights the outside; a fair time to think about stopping for those who would, but I going to decline. I still hold out hope for a last charge of sap in the face of the oncoming spring. We still have much to make up.

[It's easier to remember to turn on the valve in the first place]

That’s when you go to the Thetford General and grab some of those silly chemical hand warmer things that they sell to New Yorkers and Bostonites passing through. Duct tape them to the line, and voila, you have a cleared pipe and a working valve.

I think I’m going to leave that up there so that in the fall the deer hunters will have something to wonder about.

First, though, we tricked a bunch of friends that it would be fun to “take a walk” in the woods. We have very gullible friends, and they found themselves looking for and fixing vacuum leaks. Here is one hapless victim using channel lock pliers to tighten a saddle. Saddles are the plastic pieces that pierce into the mainline and allow the smaller, lateral lines to feed in. They are weak points in the vacuum system.

[Friend "taking walk"]

Meanwhile, in the sugar shack, we conducted the annual “changing of the membrane ceremony,” which involves taking the reverse osmosis membrane out of storage and inserting it into the machine. Since our machine was built before I was born and designed by crazy Quebecois people, we have to lift up the 600 pounds of steel and insert the four-foot-long membrane up the bottom. Here’s a picture of me apparently beating my head against it, which it turns out is easier then lifting it, and a little less painful.

[Head banging on reverse osmosis machine]

Reverse osmosis machines help you concentrate sap before you boil it, saving vast amounts of energy. It works essentially by forcing the sap through a big sock that has very consistently small holes it it. The holes are big enough for water molecules to pass through, but not big enough for sugar molecules to pass. Thus, it forces out a good deal of pure water before you even put it into the evaporator. It’s testy, though; cannot freeze, lest it break; and seems to operate very differently from year to year, as though the mice have gotten inside and change the wiring around just for kicks.

Last year, we got it working, but we found that the directions we got from the previous owner were complete hogwash. The pressure settings they suggested weren’t physically possible. This year, we set it up, and we can’t repeat last year’s settings, but we can come close to what the previous owner suggested. In the next few days, we’ll come up with a few dozen theories on that, but I’m skeptical we’ll ever know why.

I had one of my clever ideas over the summer and installed some large tanks for permeate water (the stuff forced out of the sap) outside the sugar shack to save some room for additional concentrate (the concentrated sap). But we found tonight that the feed pump cannot retrieve that permeate water – something we need for cleaning the RO at the end of the night – because the pump won’t bring up water from a level lower than the pump. This is bad. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be out there replumbing things in an even more complex manner to see if I can use some of our overhead storage for permeate.

The big event of the evening was the christening of the big maple syrup arch with its first flame. It is a beautiful thing. For all the complexity of a big arch and set of pans, everything went perfectly. It boiled smoothly, quickly, evenly. We sat around in wonderment that we hadn’t screwed up a single thing. And, boy, did it boil.

[This isn't boiling; this is BOILING]

The one element of concern with the arch is that we went through quite a bit of wood with this first boil. We will figure out how to fire it more efficiently as we go along, but it’ll be interesting to see if we wind up scrounging for additional fuel before the end of the season. Here is a picture of the firebox opened for a firing on the left-hand side. That opening is about 30 inches wide.

[The gaping maw of "the maple syrup monster"]

[The installation this week of the decidedly low-tech "new" stack]

Very few of them came with directions. The couple manuals that did come with them. turned out to be written in French. Even after translating them, they weren’t very helpful. But that’s sugaring. Part of the fun is the fiddling with the equipment to make it all work together efficiently, causing all sorts of opportunities for arguments and mayhem.

It kept us in the shack more than we should have been and spending less time out in the woods. I’m looking forward to this coming boiling season to get out into the sugarbush a little more often, checking lines and spending less time with wrenches and duct tape.

This past week we had a couple warm days, including a beautiful 40-degree run overnight with mist and rain that must have had the sugar maple trees ready to pop with sap. We and most others were caught out unready to tap (still are), and now it’s cold again. I’m betting on this coming weekend, after Valentine’s Day to tap out. We should be ready by then, even though we still have lots of line work to do.

As far as new technologies we’re introducing in 2009, we have a short list. We’ll have steam hoods this year, which isn’t that big a deal. They came with the used evaporator we bought. This directs the steam out the ports in the roof. We may also introduce automatic draw-off, which is a clever device that senses the temperature of the fluid in the sugar pan and opens up a valve only when it reaches the boiling temperature of maple syrup. This will free up an extra hand in the sugar house, although it does involve a lot of fiddly settings and is yet another thing that could go awry. I broached the topic with the guys, and they all furrowed their brows.

Other than that, our priority has been redoing many of the older lines we use, so that we can get much more sap this year to feed the larger evaporator. We completely re-did our bush in Strafford, expanding it to about 1050 taps, and just this past week started running line to an additional 200 trees here in Thetford, making for a combined total of about 1,600. With good vacuum and a good sap year, this might provide as much as 700 gallons of maple syrup, doubling or tripling our production from last year.

Long story short: it took me a couple hours just to wade out there and heave the branches off, some of which proved to be rather a bit larger than I’d expected once I levered them out of the snow. I very distinctly remember squinting down the hill at the shack, wondering what the relative energy expense would be heading down to get a chainsaw and coming back versus manhandling a few hundred pounds of sugar maple. Had I known, I would have gone for the saw.

By the time I freed the lines, it had grown dark. I’m eyeing the 500 trees we have yet to run by the lines, and I’m thinking it’ll be a close thing before the weather breaks for the sap season.

Moving through the snow carrying some tens of pounds of tools and fittings makes me think of astronauts lumbering around the moon, with movement restricted, moving slowly and accomplishing relatively little over an extended time. Everyone says it, but no one actually does it: we need to get this stuff done in the fall, before it snows.