Sugarin’

Since I was a little kid, sugaring has been one of those events that heralds the coming of Spring. In fact, Sugaring is really kind of another season of its own, here in New England; at least in the New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts corner of New England that I live in. It falls between Deep Winter and Mud Season, although there are plenty of years that the seasons overlap and a few where one of the three seem non-existent. To those uninitiated with any of these seasons, Sugaring falls somewhere between the last week or two of February and the first week of April.

When I was just a little guy, living in Keene, we experienced sugaring season only by seeing the sap buckets hanging on the maple trees along Summit Road or Old Walpole Road when we went for a drive. It usually meant that at some point during the season, we would get maple sugar candy treats, often at Grandma’s house. On those weekend drives with Mom & Dad, my brother would be beside himself with excitement, and he would fill the car with screams of “Buckets, buckets, buckets!”

We moved to Westmoreland when I was 9, and our new place had scores of big giant old maples along the stone walls running through the woods and at the edge of our field. Dad decided that first winter that we could try making our own maple syrup, and so we went up to Bascom’s sugar house in Walpole and bought 25 buckets, lids and spigots.

When February school vacation rolled around, we got all our gear together, put our on snowshoes, went out, and tapped 25 trees. It was amazing. We drilled the holes with a brace and bit, and no sooner had we pulled the drill bit out, but slightly sweet tree sap started flowing. We hammered in the spigots, hung up our buckets and lids, and listened to that beautiful sound of drips in the buckets that would echo across the field to the house.

We didn’t have an evaporator for boiling the sap back then, but Dad knew how to make anything. He took an old oil drum, welded some legs, made a door and chimney and cut a hole in the top for an old refrigerator pan to sit in. We set the contraption up in the middle of the backyard between the house and the barn and boiled sap on the weekends. It felt magical.

During the following years, our technology progressed. First, we moved the “evaporator” into the barn. We spent so many nights, Dad, Mom, David, Dan and I, hanging out in the barn, watching the sap boil. I can’t really express the tranquility. Its hard to define… you have cold wet feet and pant legs from gathering sap, your face and hands are alternately chilled by the cold outside and burned by the fantastic heat of the fire. You stare at the sap bubbling and roiling steam, and it seems as if time stops…all of a sudden its dark and 9:00 at night and time to go in. Most nights, Dad would drain off the “almost syrup” and bring it into the house to finish boiling on the stove.The whole house would smell of sticky sweet maple syrup.

The next boom in technology was the sugar house and a real evaporator. Dad built the sugar house one summer, and then designed and built the evaporator. He made it with angle iron, thick sheet metal, fire brick and stove pipe and he had stainless steel pans made up for boiling the sap in.

There was a top pan for warming and a lower pan for hard boiling. A spigot allowed the top pan to slowly drip into the bottom pan and the bottom pan had a draw spigot to drain off the syrup when it was done.

A friend of mine and I picked up 50 more sap buckets sophomore year in high school to boost production. We had an old 1000 gallon milk cooler to store the sap in. There were a few years during high school that I spent long hours out in the sugar house during sugaring season, boiling sap, making syrup, and trying my hand at other artisan activities, like carving and blacksmithing. There may even have been a few beers involved during some of the weekend sugaring events.

Now its years and years later. At least that’s what the calendar says. It certainly doesn’t seem it. I have my own kids and we have our own place with our own maple trees. When we first moved here, I hung up a few buckets, but it was a poor year and we didn’t really have anything other than the kitchen stove to boil sap on. Boiling sap inside makes a sticky mess on the ceiling and windows, and isn’t the optimal way to go. Nobody seemed that interested anyway, so we didn’t do it again…. until this year.

This year, Grace began asking around Christmas time if we could tap trees and make syrup. I decided why not, and we planned to tap around the first week of March. That week, I stopped at Dad’s house and picked up 6 buckets and lids, since the old ones we had were really no good anymore. Grace & I went to Agway and I bought her 6 spigots and we came home, got the hand drill out and tapped trees. 

Just like when I was a kid, as soon as we pulled out the drill, the sap started to flow. Her face lit up as she pounded in the spigots and they began to drip. By Sunday, we had 6 full buckets, so we decided to boil. If you follow me at all, you know that I have a fantastic fire pit of stone that I built a few years ago and this became the base of operations. I inverted an old metal grill stand in the center of the pit, put the grate in it and placed a big lobster pot on top. We built a fire underneath and spent all Sunday afternoon boiling down our little cache of sap. In the end, we made about a pint of delicious, amber colored maple syrup.

The following weekend, we bought a 10 gallon metal trash can to store sap in, and by Saturday morning, it was overflowing. I had to work on Saturday, so Tracy and Grace lit up the fire and started to boil on Saturday afternoon. The whole weekend was perfect for sugaring. The sun was shining, there was a nice breeze, and the snow was corny, warmish and melting. The temperature dipped to 19 at night and rose to 45 during the day. Sap was dripping furiously into our buckets, so much so, that we gathered 3 more times over the course of the weekend. 

This time, the whole family spent the day outside. While the sap boiled, I cleaned up winter debris from the patio, took down Christmas lights that had been buried in snow and cleanup up my work shed. The kids played around the yard. Tracy was in and out all day.  We all drifted back to fire every so often to check on the sap and stare at the steam and flames.

By supper time, we were all mentally and physically exhausted; from sun, from cold, from fire, from steam, from the difficulty of walking in the wet snow and from the fresh air.  Coincidently, this was the weekend of the “big moon” and the vernal equinox. I finally brought the sap in around dark, to finish up on the stove. We ended up boiling from Saturday morning until Sunday night and made about 1-1/2 quarts of darker, yet still delicious syrup.

There was such a change in all of us after this. I felt a huge increase in my own mental, emotional and physical energy levels, and noted the brightened moods and tranquil minds that we all seemed to share. There were lots of smiles and happy faces. Even Tracy, with her recent surgery and pain, smiled and felt better.

Sugaring for us isn’t about making syrup. I don't really use it, and the kids will have probably eaten it up in a few months, so its not a food source or a money saver. Sugaring is a ritual of Spring, a ritual I have known for at least 35 years, and now something I love that I have shared with my family, and that hopefully, my kids will someday share with theirs.