I don't like writing about things I've never experienced firsthand, but maple syrup seems to be a logical subject for Weeds and Wisdom. Tapping enough trees to get 40 gallons of sap and boiling it down until you've finally gotten a single gallon of syrup seems like an awful lot of effort for very little reward. Of course if you're set up to make maple syrup commercially, with all those green plastic umbilical cords snaking through the woods, the job might be worthwhile, but that's not what a little old homemaker would be doing.
There are five farmers making syrup in the Northwest Corner, the Jacquiers, the Childs, the Fords, Winter Mead and Terry Anstett. The Jacquiers have been in the business since the early 1950. A few years ago they built a new sap house close to the road and so many people stopped to tell them something was on fire they had to make a sign "MAKING SYRUP. NO FIRE!"
Winter Mead hammers in 3200 taps each winter, boils down 2400 gallons of sap to get 600 gallons of maple syrup. His green umbilical cords weave for miles through the woods, stopping at one sugar maple after another. Since I doubt if any of you want to tackle making such quantities of syrup, I decided to get out my copy of "Facts for Farmers" to see if it had any quaint and unusual facts on the subject.
This ancient book, published in 1863, contains over a thousand tattered pages on subjects ranging from birds and bees, poultry and piggeries to food for the sick, how to build a windmill, grow grapes or tobacco, plus a last chapter on "miscellaneous items of useful knowledge to farmers."
There was a 7-page chapter on "maple sirupping". Naturally most of it was so out of date I won't bore you with it, but there were definitely a few parts and pieces worth mentioning. I learned, for instance, that the original settlers tapped their trees with an axe. In fact there's an old folk tale claiming that this is how the art of sugaring first started. Someone left an axe embedded in a maple tree, there happened to be a bucket under it, the sun and wind reduced the sap through evaporation and lo and behold - maple syrup.
Solan Robinson, the editor of Facts for Farmers, gives a detailed description of how to tap a tree, make wooden spouts from sumac or elder and iron spouts out of hoop iron. A Puritanical old man who had no qualms about stating his opinions, Mr. Robinson ended this section with "Never tap your trees with an ax, even upon land that you are going to clear, because you may not live to clear it, and your successor may desire to save some of the trees that your wrong act has spoiled."
In discussing at what height to put the spout, Mr. Robinson quotes a neighbor, Mr. Herrick. "I tap four feet from the ground. Some might object on the ground that the lower a tree is tapped the more sap will run. This is not the fact… as anyone can learn from the red squirrel, a famous sugar-maker, who knows when and where to tap a tree. He performs his tapping in the highest perpendicular limbs or twigs, and leaves the sun and wind to do the evaporating, and in due season and pleasant weather, you will see him come round and with great gusto gather his sirup into his stomach."
Mr. Robinson discusses sap buckets, boilers, evaporation trays, the process of making a proper fire for heating the sap, and how to filter out impurities by adding a pint of milk and two or three well-beaten eggs to ten gallons of cooled syrup. Then it's heated and these additions are removed, along with any foreign matter adhering to them. The syrup is filtered a second time using pulverized burned bones - animal charcoal - that removes the coloring matter.
Before discussing the economic aspects of making syrup, sugar or molasses from maple sap, Mr. Robinson warns his readers "Waste nothing. Wash all the sweet out of everything, and reconcentrate. Study economy in everything. Upon this alone depends the success. Do not suffer a hand employed in your sugar camp to ever carry such deadly weapons as guns and rum bottles, nor articles so destructive to success as cards, dice, dominoes and novels. You must watch and work, and then you need not doubt success. Sugar-making is pleasant, healthy, hard work. A camp is no place for lounging."
Get that? Doesn't sound like much fun to me. If you have a good sugarbush (a grove of sugar maples) I recommend you let someone who's in the business use it in return for a couple of jugs of syrup. On the other hand, if you'd really like to try it yourself, get the little book by Rink Mann called Backyard Sugarin', published by Countryman Press in Woodstock, Vt.
