The old
maple up the road had little ice sickles dangling from a few places where small
twigs and branches had broken away since last fall. This is a sure sign that
maple sugaring will begin in earnest for those few who still hang the buckets
from the maples.
It was
cold enough this morning that the running sap, rising through root pressure
upward to the branches, leaded out of these small break points in the maple and
froze into miniature stalactites of attenuated sugar water.
Behaving
just as the squirrels, I broke off a small sickle to lick it, and sure enough I
could taste the faintest hint of sweetness.
Just
west and south of Paxton in the Brookfields is a large maple sugaring farm. We
went to tour there a couple of years ago, when the sap was in full pressure.
What an operation, with hundreds of yards (miles?) of clear plastic tubing
overhead, connecting all the tapped sugar maples to a central collecting vat.
It was amazing to stand below one of the lines and watch the semi-clear liquid
flowing toward the sugar house, a stream of sugar water interrupted
occasionally with tiny bubbles in the tube.
The
sugar house was a small barn that contained a large boiler vat of sorts, fed
continually by a voracious wood fire burning beneath. Evidently, during the
sugaring season, the fires burn night and day for a couple of weeks on end,
boiling down the sap in the vats until the water component is sufficiently
distilled to leave the concentrated syrup behind.
Like so
many things, there was so much labor and time for such a small yet sweet
reward.
No comments:
Post a Comment