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.

Last year we managed to burn about a dozen cord of wood in the process of making 520 gallons of maple syrup. We’ll have a total between 30 and 40 cord by the time we’re done. Might be enough for two years, then again, maybe we’ll get some folks sending us some additional sap.

I’ll be heading up to Vershire tomorrow morning to pick up some old tin roofing a friend is setting aside as he takes down a falling farmhouse on his woodlot. Will be sure to stock him up with a good amount of maple syrup. This tin will go atop the split and stacked wood. It’s just about the best thing to help dry it out. The wood starts off about 40 percent water when it’s split. By the time it’s dry enough for my tastes, it’s gone down to between 15 and 17 percent water – about as low as wood can go in Vermont’s outdoor air. We had a doohickey with long prongs you could stick in the end of a log to tell its moisture level. It was sitting out until a friend’s twin boys came by and started to try to test each other’s moisture levels. Turns out they’re both about 85 percent water incidentally, which makes sense, as they’re twins.

In retrospect, the number of gallons of maple syrup we made last year relative to the wood we burned indicates that our pre-concentration of the sap isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be. Suggests we’re concentrating the maple sugar in that fluid only between 2 and 3 times. We’d much rather see between 5 and 6 times concentration, as that’s where we’ve been able to show consistently that the flavor remains the same after going through our reverse osmosis machine. Just for the sake of argument, if we did concentrate by 6x, then the wood we have on hand could make more than 4,000 gallons of maple syrup, if you could find the sap. That gets the mind going.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

Last year we had another close call, with a lot of ice, but less damage that one might expect. Perhaps we do so well in ice storms because this bush was really snockered back in the 1998 ice storm, where whole groups of trees were wiped out. Having all of the more vulnerable trees knocked out of the system, maybe this bush is just a bit more resilient. That’s probably too optimistic a perspective. I’m going to stick with the idea that we were just lucky.

Many people who make maple syrup will not tap trees the next year or two if they’ve been damaged by ice storms. There are two theories about that: the cautious people think that tapping is just one more stress on over-stressed trees. The other people figure that there is so much stress from crack wounds after an ice storm, that taking what you can get via the tap is an insignificant addition. I count myself among the more cautious people.

The ice storms in 07 and 08 brought home to me the benefit of having a split bush – that is a maple forest that sits in two different places. While very inconvenient for sap transport, this diversity does allow a maple syrup operation to hedge some in terms of weather disasters. This allows us to think about major equipment purchases without the worry that some years we’ll have zero revenue.

We had quite a set of snow storms a couple weeks before Christmas 08. I heard we had 32 inches after having practically no snow at all this fall and winter so far. It certainly seemed that deep. Here is a picture (above) of the woodshed with the snow. That big rock on the right was just at my sternum level when I set it there, so that snow would be easily past my knees.

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