Getting a Little Sappy
I never thought much of March. Despite the occasional crocus, real spring weather is still a long way off, most years. Back in grade school, regardless of when Easter fell that year, March always seemed a tediously uninterrupted month, with little to decorate for and no songs to learn, which meant that we really did have to get serious about long division and adverbs. The March Easters—too early for real spring --were a mess anyway, inevitably sleety and raw, and a waste of new shoes for those who had them.
As you probably have heard, I live where there is no pavement. The municipal highway muck can expand down to monstrous depths, and is an uninvited guest everywhere, showing up underfoot, all the time. But I have discovered something that makes boring old March brighten up (beside the occasional Mudslide on ice in a glass,) and that is a mid-life love affair with maple trees. I should have started this years ago.
There are few maples on this island of a size worth tapping, but there are some. Our son, a Vermonter since he was 18, gave me a few spiles and buckets for Christmas 2023, a “starter kit” for tapping trees. That, and a University of Maine Cooperative Extension online webinar one nasty evening, which taught me to buy a new drill bit for the trees or to at least wash the old one first. This is my second season in the maple, uh, industry.
I am pretty certain my sap-producing island trees are red maples, and not the noble “sugar maples,” but they do fine. I have had this confirmed by other syrup makers: the difference, tree to tree, is not that big a deal. There are enough trees to support a small hobby; ours is by no means a commercial operation. I drilled the holes this year on my birthday, February 25th, and as of this writing (March 19th) have gathered a strong 30 gallons of sap. Our 8-year-old friend and I collect enough sap to be impressed with the output of our micro-sugarbush, and he is still excited to run around and peek in the buckets. With such a helper as he, I suggest our project might count as school, and to that end have asked him to produce for me a cutaway drawing of a maple tree, with descriptive scientific labels and an explanation—in cursive, to make it worse, unless he should prefer Morse code—of what’s going on with the sap anyway. Why does it go up and down, and why this time of year in particular?
My young assistant asked about whether anybody taps other species of tree, and we talked about birches, which he had heard could yield syrup. “Does anybody tap oak trees?” “No,” I say, “If you got any sap, it wouldn’t taste like anything, otherwise we’d have heard of it. The maple tree offers the sugar.”
Everybody always said you cannot possibly boil sap indoors, as “You’ll peel off the wallpaper!” The fact is, you absolutely can, if your syrup manufactory is as small-scale as ours. We haven’t even got any wallpaper, but we have got a large stainless-steel stockpot, a wedding gift of some significance back in the day. My own particular household also gets its propane wholesale. Until it is convenient to boil, the sap goes to the freezer in milk jugs. For a few days in March there are sticky drips on the floor, slightly foggy windows, and a subtle, sweet scent in the kitchen.
During our trip to the mainland we stopped to see a friend who was boiling sap in his driveway in Lincoln County, and were encouraged to discover that we were doing things more or less correctly even without the possession of a large, wood-fired evaporator setup, because the main job with handling maple sap seems to be pouring it from one container into another, and thence into another, repeatedly. That, we do.
All summer long, I gratefully barter for the homemade syrup brought here by my various New Hampshire customers, who trade me their maple syrup—boiled perfectly, with expertise and practice-- for my bread, doughnuts, and popsicles. Over a year I will eat a good deal more maple syrup than I can make. My labors are not about stocking the pantry; just a pleasing job to putter at during a humdrum time of year.
The maple trees make me think of Canada, and such are happy thoughts.