It’s that time of year again. Freezing at night here in New
England and thawing during the day. Buckets sprouting on the sides of the maple
trees to catch the slightly sweet sap that begins to flow in these conditions.
Leafless trees under harsh conditions yeilding up a nourishing food. A miracle. One bucket for a tree 10” in diameter, two buckets for a 20 incher, and up to
three for a 24 inch tree or larger. But never more than 3 per tree. Take just enough
to make a little syrup, one gallon for every 40 gallons of sap collected. A
sustainable yield, year after year.

Some folks use rubber tubing to make collecting easier, and
use reverse osmosis machines to speed the syrup making process. But my friends
and I do it the old fashioned way, collecting in individual metal buckets,
collecting  it by hand and pouring it
into a big tank behind our friend’s wood fired evaporator fueled by scrap wood
from the local sawmill. Sustainable fuel, sustainable syrup, sustainable
harvest.

We’ve collected nearly 500 gallons of sweet sap so far, yielding
about 13 gallons of rich maple syrup. Some of us tap and collect from the
trees, some of us pick up that syrup and pour it into tanks for transport to
the sugar house, where some of us cook it down into bulk syrup. Then after the
runs are finished, we’ll bottle it and give it to friends and family, pour it
onto snow, ice cream and pancakes, glaze venison with it, and make desserts.
Sweet.

But it’s also sweet  how we work together, each pulling part of
the load, and create bonds of community between us. Community sugar
concentrated from laboring together toward a common goal. We gather two kinds
of sugar each year, the kind we bottle and the kind we keep in our hearts, distilled
from common effort.

More to come……..

Share