Just down the road and around the corner from home is a little county park in the middle of a very commercialized area. It is hard to believe that the area all around the park, once upon a time, was all rustic just as this little postage stamp of wilderness that is left. Each year at the end of February they put on Maple Sugar Days; very fun and very educational.
Outdoors there is sap boiling down and a table full of syrup made from each of the past ten years. It is interesting to note the different shades of amber syrup from each year. The clear liquid in the glass jar on the far right is pure sap before it is boiled down. It resembles water in that state. Kaitlyn wasn’t exactly outfitted for hiking in the woods as we had just picked her up from a birthday party and I’d forgotten to pack her sneakers. She had skipped her quiet time after spending all morning in the pool so she was a tired girl who wanted to be carried by her Dad for most of the way.
More sap boiling down while out in the woods the sap is being collected from the taps in tin buckets. This is about as far south as you can go where conditions still exist to tap maples to make syrup. Vermont is the top producer of maple sugar but all of New England is well known for maple production. Around here trees are tapped in January and begin to flow in February. If we were to tap our own maple tree in the yard at home it would be too late this year as the buds are already swelling on it.
Conditions are just right for collecting sap when the nights are still below freezing but the days are 40 and 50 degrees. It was a rosy cheeked 38 degrees on this afternoon; the only rain free day sandwiched in the middle of many stormy ones. It was still overcast, but I thought that was just fine as I’m not much for sunny winter days. I didn’t grow up with too many of them and sun just emphasizes the stark deadness in winter around here.
Inside the barn we found all kinds of free samples of foods made with maple sugar & syrup. Nathan really liked the maple coconut cookie; Kaitlyn the maple cotton candy. Tristan found himself a recipe for the maple butter he tried that was out of this world. The maple wieners that Lindsay got a hold of were fantastic! We decided that “Elf” was on to something by putting maple syrup on everything. It makes everything better… even the unexpected.
The north sides of the trees drips much more slowly than the south sides. We stuck our fingers out to catch the drips of sap so we could taste its sweetness. We decided we would all like to live somewhere in the woods. The trails are beautiful as they just begin to stir with life once again.
Toward the end of our hike we met a woodsmen who was boiling sap right outside his shelter. He had some animal skins hanging on the side of his shelter that we could touch and he showed us his eating knife made out of teeth. Early settlers were taught by Indians how to boil sap to make sugar. One of the ways they found to boil sap down was to put it into hollowed out logs and place hot rocks from the fire into the liquid. Wooden buckets would have caught fire so that wasn’t an option. Then they would switch the cooled down rocks out to reheat and put fresh rocks into the sap. This was a 24/7 job for about 5 weeks of the late winter. Other people would go out and collect the sap, while others hunted and still others cooked for everyone. It was a cooperative affair certainly and their only source of sugar for the year. Any other sweetness to be had came in the form of berries. Bees for sweet honey were actually brought over by the Europeans and were termed by the Indians to be “white man’s flies”. Obviously it took a while for honey to be found in the wild of North America as a source of sugar.
Saying goodbye to the man at the shelter after asking some questions, the kids all took turns drilling into tree stumps to see what it was like to tap a tree.
All strapped in, rosey cheeked Nathan was ready to go home and try some fresh syrup on his dinner. We had a wonderful afternoon.
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