We’ve been pretty busy in the past few weeks, running lines, tapping and moving equipment to the Strafford sugar shack. That’s where we’ll be making most of the maple syrup this year, rather than in our Thetford Center shack. We’ve grown to the extent that we need the extra capacity.

Today we had our annual Town Meeting here in Thetford. Road Foreman? Off sugaring. Fire Chief? Ditto. I should have been too. The weather wasn’t the greatest for it (not cold enough these last few nights), but it sure would have helped to make up for some lost time. Now that the budget’s passed, we can get serious.

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.

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.

One oldtimer rhyme runs, “Wind from the east, sap runs the least. Wind from the west, the sap runs the best.” Our wind (about 5 mph) came from the east, but that’s a pretty lame breeze to matter so much. Here’s a picture of the wind pushing our steam toward the setting sun.

Nevertheless, we’re happy for what we receive, allowing us to finish off our first 55 gallon drum of maple syrup. Now we just need to figure out how to lift it.

The evaporator ran well – one of those days you regret having to shut down because the rig seems to be on a roll, pushing off more steam than seems probable. Here is John stoking the draw-off side while his friend, Addy keeps an eye on the temperature while the maple syrup keeps rolling off. Our stack temperature ran up to 650 degrees, even without the use of softwood.

Speaking of wood, we may or may not have enough this year. We had a truck load of wood delivered some mornings ago. This little pile is really meant for next year, but we’ve started to eye it. Note how some of those sugar maple stems are running sap out of the sapwood, even as they lie cut. I have half a mind to affix a couple buckets on them to see what sort of quantity we could get out of them, especially as they’re visible from the road.

She and I both think it looks a lot like the governor was caught sneaking up on the tree Hamburgler-style to steal sap. Maybe one of the governor’s rivals has an operative in the maple association’s staff.

This year’s ceremony will take place at 11 a.m. on Friday at a tree next to Mead Chapel in Middlebury, Douglas’s hometown. There will be all sorts of maple syrup treats there for the attendees. In an attempt to create a media event approximating Groundhog Day, some maple syrup folks push the idea that if the governor’s tap shows a sap flow immediately, it’ll be a good sugar year. That, in turn, has led to silly behavior. I know of one farmer whose tree a Vermont governor tapped some years ago, and being cold the night before, he felt obligated to join his wife outdoors with an extension cord and a couple hair dryers to warm up the sap wood sufficiently to allow for a flow the next morning.

[Installing a saddle (interface between lateral line and main line). Hopefully not creating a vacuum leak.]

Robert concluded that it was the saddles we’d put up throughout the bush, as the couple he checked down by the shack seemed to be leaking. He was despondent. I was despondent. Two months of work to fix the old leaky system, and we had a new leaky system. It was dark, and we didn’t have time to investigate or even start to fix.

I didn’t sleep well. Woke up around dawn and went up there to check it out for myself. Found that the saddles were holding pretty well. Found 5 major leaks – mostly your typical sorts of things, such as end caps that were never put in place, or a saddle that wasn’t hooked into its hole.

Came back down after a couple hours of work, and the vacuum was up to 16 bars of mercury when all five mainlines were open to the vacuum. When I shut off one in particular, the others went up over 18 bars, so I know I have some work to do on that one line. Must be a leak or two I missed. We’re going to have good vacuum this year, and that’ll bring in another 50-80 percent of the sap we’d get with just gravity. I am very, very relieved to know that all that work and expense will actually pay off.

In an hour or two, I’ll turn on the smaller vacuum at our smaller bush here in Thetford Center. Will likely see the same thing: terrible vacuum, until we go up into the woods and find what sort of crazy thing has happened to the line over the last ten months. Will actually be fun. I’ll bring the dogs and make a nice walk of it. This afternoon we should see our first sap flow, although I doubt we’ll get to boil today. Gives us an extra evening to prepare and clean the sugarhouse.

[Jupiter passing over the Strafford bush the night before tapping]

Coming up Sawnee Bean Road, adrenaline pumped through me when I could first catch sight of the Strafford property. I wondered if I’d be able to sleep that night, with the prospect of getting tapped the next day. The Strafford bush lay up at the end of a valley that wends down Barker Brook way, through to Thetford and merging with the valley of the Ompomanoosuc River. When people in Thetford drive north on route 113, they look left up through both of those valleys and see a field up at the very top, bordered by trees. They wonder where that is, and why it always has snow when the ground in the valley lay bare. When I drive that way, I look up and my pulse quickens, knowing the potential of those trees and of all the work we’ve put in to get them there.

After putting away the equipment for the next day at the Strafford sugar shack, I stepped outside to watch the trees and listen. Enough wind was up to keep twigs in the canopy rattling against one another. I again thought I must be mistaken about Jupiter and that it must be some sort of man-made light source. It was just so large.

In the starlight I could make out the lightly swaying trees in their little depressions in the snow that indicate sugar season is about to start. Robert had mentioned that it would snow Sunday, which only made me more eager. While other sugarmakers would hold off a day tapping, we were ready with new lines, all above the snow. No blizzard would be able to slow us. We’d be done by lunch, another eleven hundred holes drilled, tapped and hooked to the mainlines running down to the shack.

By this time, I’d decided the light was Jupiter – a friendly presence often visiting during late night boils. It reminded me of Robert Frost writing a couple generations ago about Orion looking in on the doings of a man, arriving by “throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains.” I turned to the east to see just that, Orion having risen in Jupiter’s path up over Tug Mountain.

I write this now Sunday evening. We are tapped out. Monday and Tuesday will be cold, and no sap will run – thankfully, as we have much work to do in the sugar shack to be ready to boil and make maple syrup. Wednesday will be warm enough to warrant testing the vacuum system, and then Thursday and Friday, the gates of spring will open, heralded by the rushing sound of sap coming off of Hubbard Hill through lines we’ve directed to the flat below.

[The Vermont Security System, patent pending]

Coupled with being right across from the house, this has worked to keep the sugar shack safe. But friends and family have a poor record of remembering where they put this shard of siding after they take it out of the hasp. This winter I found an easy solution to that, with all the icicles forming on our standing seem roof, I’ve taken to using them as handy latch clasps, as pictured below at night. The ice even reflects moonlight and starlight to act as a convenient marker when groping for the door.

Best still, it is a natural indicator of the arrival of sugar season. Yesterday, the lock came undone, melting through in the afternoon heat of 33 degrees. I came home to find the sugar shack open, and when I went to investigate I found not a visiting friend, but shards on the ground by the door showing winter is broken. We’d better get ready.

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.

Some highlights:

- A good deal of what we know (which is still pretty incomplete) about how and why sap flows

- Optimal tapping studies, including depth and placement

- Paraformaldehyde pros and (mostly) cons

- Basics of sap collection, including piping and vacuum mechanics

- Sugarbush management

- Forestry elements, such as optimal stocking

- Some very extensive bibliography information on lots of additional research

- A look at learnings about maple tree genetics and reproduction (still pretty rudimentary)

- Costs and economics of sugaring, including analysis of buckets versus lines

- Wood versus oil and gas

- Use of preheaters

- Employing baffles under flue pans

- Alternative evaporator designs, like vapor compression and tubular evaporator pans

- Marketing maple syrup

- Maple syrup grading history and differences between jurisdictions

- Consumer attitudes (perhaps a little dated) on maple syrup

- Review of older container options