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Dispatch from the Sugarwoods, 2018 - Part 1

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A broken vibrissae protruding from a dropline. Based on the size and shape of the hole, I'm guessing red fox.

In the old days, when most people were farmers, the deep cold months were spent working wood. Maybe you logged the back 40 for income, maybe you just put up 50 cords to burn in your drafty, two-woodstove-one-cookstove farmhouse and your sugarhouse’s evaporator. Close your eyes and hear the rhythmic cadence of a one-man crosscut saw; the metallic ping of a maul head hitting a splitting wedge; the voices of children as they scavenge the forest floor for limbwood the size of your pointer finger. Too much work! we’ve been trained to think by four generations of modernists; the fossil fuel dealer pushing this line a close cousin of the tract home developer, the editor of a Jazz Age urban magazine, the I’m-sure-decent-but-nevertheless-self-interested salesman who peddles Hungry-Man frozen dinners. What drudgery! they’d say. But you and I know the pride and sense of ownership of a woodpile put up with your own hands. The catharsis of being amidst trees and amongst family. Cutting wood in winter was what people used to do – that’s such a covetous notion in this age where so many of society’s ills can be boiled down to people just not having a sense of purpose anymore.

That all just got oddly dark; the point is that these old farm families chipped away at the wood and stewarded their farm animals all winter, and then in early March, around Town Meeting Day, went out to the barn and took out the sap buckets and transitioned to sugaring for four to six weeks – that’s about how long a taphole will stay wet when it’s exposed to the air. When the sap stopped running, they pulled and washed their buckets in a weekend, sold their sugar, plowed their money into seed and everything else they’d need for the upcoming ag seasons, and transitioned to plowing their fields.

These days, sugaring season never ends for many sugarmakers. Those of us who do it part-time often have full-time jobs, so our prep work runs year-round during evenings and weekends. Those who do it full time, with 50,000-, 100,000-, 150,000-tap operations, have turned the production, packaging, and sales into year-round businesses. Air-tight tubing systems allow for a longer sap run window, so production-minded sugarmakers tap in mid-winter and usually make syrup in February, March, and April; on weird years, which in our woods include five out of the last six (read this if you want to see the weirdness quantified), you might throw January or May onto that list. Going forward, October, November, and December might become part of the active sugaring season. I was reading in the Maple News recently about a sugarmaker in the Catskills who tapped in November to make a fall crop. This is not a new idea – sap runs anytime there’s freezing temperatures at night and warm temperatures during the day, so for the past 50 years there have been outside-the-box thinkers who have tried to capitalize on being the only sugarhouse with authentic steam rising for the leaf peepers. It’s traditionally never worked well because it’s often too hot in the fall – if you think about it, the earth, the trees, are full of banked heat then, whereas in spring they’re full of banked cold. Sap is perishable, so you want just enough heat for the sap to run but not enough for it to spoil. Because fall microclimates skew warm, fall syrup is said to be of poorer quality. (I’ve never made it myself, so can’t say first hand.) Another reason it never worked in any sustained way is the fact that putting a hole in a tree in the fall and then another in the spring puts twice as much stress on a tree. What’s interesting about the guy in New York, though, was that he wasn’t double-tapping – he was tapping one block of trees in the fall, representing about a quarter of his bush, then giving those trees a year and a half off; the idea was to rotate the bush that way. This eliminates the stressing-the-tree hang-up. And it makes you wonder if in 50 years, producers with enough taps for this kind of rotation will all be tapping this way, not so much for the boutique leaf-peeper market but as a hedge against climate change and unpredictable spring weather.

Anyway, the point before I got distracted again is that there’s no time off anymore. In our operation we spent last summer rebuilding a major section of one of our sugarbushes – we try to we replace drops (the little lines that run from the tree to the tubing) on a three- to five-year cycle, and try to replace laterals (the small-diameter tubing that function like veins) and mainlines (the big-diameter tubing that function like arteries) on a 10- to 15-year cycle. We look at it like painting a house, where if you do a section a year every year, you’re never stuck having to do the whole thing at once. This technique spreads out the labor and cost outlay; it also spreads out the payoff from the new lines. Clean, leak-free infrastructure will always produce more sap than older, used infrastructure. By replacing in chunks, we get a small boost in production every year, rather than all at once one year and then a steady decline after that.

We put the finishing touches on the rebuild just this week, which has us behind on tapping. We were all hoping for a later season, but the warm 10-day forecast suggests that’s not in the cards. You do this long enough, you learn that you can’t get too worked up about missing early season sap. It’s not as sweet. It’s harder to collect. It doesn’t run as prolifically as you think it will, since the trees are all logy. Still, you need the panic to get the adrenaline going to give you the energy to put in the long days required to get ready.

As I write this we’re about 50 percent tapped. One vacuum that should be pulling 25 inches of mercury is pulling 19; the other that should be pulling 27 inches is pulling 17. That means leaks. Mostly squirrel chews, but also coyote, fox, deer, bear and probably other species that left no concrete evidence – most animals “see” with their mouths, like babies, and these lines are something to study. That means first we go tree to tree getting the lines up, straight, and tight. And then we go tree to tree to put a hole in each one. And then we go tree to tree fixing leaks in the lines. It seems like you ought to be able to fix leaks while you do the line work or the tapping, but it never works out that way, as the vacuum system is something of a Catch-22. For the holes to really be apparent, you need a tight system – they whistle then. But if there are holes, it’s not a tight system.

That’s about as much report as I can muster at the moment; the trees beckon. Good luck to all you other sugarmakers out there. Do let us know in the comment section how you’re making out.

Dispatch from the Sugarwoods, 2018 - Part 2

Dispatch from the Sugarwoods, 2018 - Part 3

Discussion *

Feb 17, 2018

Wonderful!  News from the sugarbush is like a “Right of Spring” for our family.  I am delighted to hear your reports and know that this season is back in swing.  Keep it going; I love your writing.

Keith Johnson
Feb 17, 2018

Wonderful article. I feel like I have written the article in a sense. Many of your expressed thoughts are similar to mine. I only run 10 taps and no vacuum. Wondering about this season. I have an office job but can’t wait to go at it again. Been sugaring for 30 years.

Jim

Jim

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