Nectar of The Earth
Spring 2022
2022
What is the first sign of spring? There are different answers to that question. The first bloom of a particular flower, the first robin. Or, if you are that particular kind of person, you give the astronomical date of spring. But I have come to know a different marker of the season turning: The day when the maple sap begins to run. Truly it is one of the very first marks that winter is breaking. It can come as early as February if the weather is right. In this month darkness still sits heavy over the world, but when the sap begins to move you know day is coming. Spring is on the move.
This spring is the first year I have ever tapped maple trees to collect sap and make syrup. In retrospect, it is the sort of thing I wonder why it never occurred to me to do this before. The initial cost was around $30 in supplies for ten spiles and ten lengths of hose and two filters. The barrier to entry was quite low, and I ended up with a very respectable amount of maple syrup. I could have easily done this in my teens and early twenties. But somehow I never took the step until this year.
I am trying to do new things this year. When I took stock of myself last year I decided to step out of the habits of my comfort zone. And it has been uncomfortable, with challenges of maple syrup only the beginning. But the results have been worth it.
In the process of making maple syrup the most intimidating part is boiling the sap to the right temperature. I read all sorts of dire warnings about what would happen if I boiled the syrup to even one degree too high. (It will turn into maple candy!) So I had visions of ruining all my hard work in one moment of errant temperature increase. I have heard stories about it happening.
The second thing I fretted about was gathering sap too late in the season. The literature warned that I must stop collecting sap once the trees begin to bud. (The aste of the sap turns vile!) Fair enough. But instructions were a bit vague about how to determine exactly when that day arrived. The sense I got from what I read is that if I waited until there were big fat buds on the trees that was far too late. And if I collected too late I would ruin that final batch of syrup and waste a lot of effort. Because of my fretting over this point, I may have stopped collecting sap a bit early this year. I have more to learn here.
It would have been delightfully old fashioned if I had the old type metal spiles and metal buckets to collect my sap. The cost of going that route (if such supplies are not banging around in an old shed) is a much more than the $30 I spent on some plastic spiles and plastic tubing. And rather than collecting in metal buckets, I gathered my sap in old milk jugs. My venture is low class, but it worked.
The whole process was fun in the way of turning straw into gold. There is a magic to taking what is practically water from trees and turning it into luxuriously delicious syrup. It is like the trees are giant straws that suck the nectar from deep in the earth. If you could dig cookies up from the ground that would be something equivalent.
What tempered the fun was the reality that the process was time consuming. Very time consuming. Probably the hardest part was trying to line up the sap boiling with the days of the week when I was home. That part would have been a lot easier if I was a farmer working at home all week, but as it was I had a cram period of sap boiling every weekend which started to get really old after several weeks.
One of the first things I will try to improve next year is creating a more efficient boiling process. At this point in time I am pretty much stuck boiling the sap on days when I am home from work. That means staying up really late. But I could stay up less late (or at least late fewer days) if my boiling time was reduced through efficiency. This year my process was starting the boiling on the wood stove in the kitchen in huge canning pots. We had the wood stove running to heat the house so this made the maple syrup add no cost since the wood was already being used. That tickled my frugal nature, and it also made the whole process feel very homey with the pots on the stove. The final boiling down step was then done on the propane stove.
The problem with this little romantic picture was that evaporating the water this way was very inefficient. The wood stove did not keep the pot at the optimal temperature, and the pot was too tall to evaporate off effectively. The ideal way to evaporate is to have a long pan with a lot of surface area, kept at the perfect temperature. I don’t know if I will perfectly accomplish all these things, but it is my goal to improve on what I have this year.
From the ten spiles I made almost three gallons of syurp, though I didn’t boil it down quite as much as would have been ideal. I was very happy with that result. I look forward to doing this next year. Beyond just the deliciousness of the syrup, there is a pleasing rhythm to tapping the trees in this first act of a new year. It is a marker of the seasons moving, the first heralding of spring. It is the nectar of the earth, the promise of new life.
2023
Another year, more learning. Doing maple syrup gives me a hint at what life is like if we live more in step with nature. Western Civilization now lives mostly (if not entirely) ensconced away from what the seasons give and take. Those turnings of life happen outside the window—perhaps we peek out the curtain at the leaves and sunshine—away from our carefully regulated lives. But with maple syrup you need to know the time of the season turning, and in that attention you feel the moving. I feel the moving. It’s like a dance.
Before I did maple syrup, January was just a miserable dark and cold month that felt miles away from spring. Now, January is still just as cold and dark, but I know the glimmer of spring coming. The tree tapping is coming; February might be when I need to get started, so January is the thinking time. Winter is here, but it is time to think about spring. Then February arrives—and in years past it could be the hardest month of the winter, the cold and dark having long overstayed their welcome.
The winter is still heard, but now in those waning winter days when endurance wears thin there is something new—the first hearld of life returning. The taps are put in the trees. There is still snow on the ground, but the trees are starting to stir. The giants are waking and spring is coming, though we cannot see it yet. It is such a hopeful thing. Maple tapping is such a hopeful thing.
Hope in the midst of bleakness. That captures the reality of maple tapping for me. February is dark, and there can be a kind of grimness to collecting buckets of sap in the dark. But there is also a quiet hopefulness to it. In the chill night the moon peaks through the bare branches of the trees, the clouds make their silent march across the sky. It might seem like the world is lost in winter but the two brimming buckets of sap I carry down the path proclaim life, and the first taste of a new year. That is hope in the midst of bleakness.
It is a good way to start the year. It is good to feel the rhythms of the seasons. Would that I could do it more through every season of the year. Yes, and every season of life. That is something I would do well to think about in the places of life that feel busy or empty or hard.
It is fun including the children in the process. When a bacth is finished they are able to taste some fresh maple syrup which is both wonderfully like candy and also a bit like magic. (Hey, I’m old and it still feels a bit like magic to me!)
At the beginning the boys came along for the tapping process. I had them help bring some of the equipment so that my hands were a little more free. They felt like Big Stuff marching up along the side of the property, holding tools and watching as I drilled and put in the spiles. I could tell they felt the importance of being part of something bigger than yourself.
During this process they stumbled across history. Most of the trees I tap are along the edge of the property and many decades ago an old farmer had nailed barb wire fencing to the trees. Relics of a bygone era. The wire is almost entirely rusted away, but in some places it still clings on to the trees, the ridged lines drooping down into the bramble and old leaves.
"What is that?" Tigie-boy asked, pointing. I explained to him what it was, and he seemed amazed. "You mean this used to be pasture?" He sounded almost astonished that the place we now lived and roamed previously attained to the glorious farming category of pasture (because farms are cool). I affirmed that it had been pasture.
"You had pasture when you were growing up here with the uncles?" he pressed. To that I had to demur. We had no cows or even goats up here because by the time we lived here the fence was already too far gone.
"Oh," Tadhg said, and perhaps there was a hint of disappointment as his eyes peered through the trees and saw across time a grander and golden age of farming and pasture. Maybe some day we can again have pasture, my son.
I did improve my maple syrup process this year. Since it is the second year and I have proved to myself that I intend to keep at this endeavor I felt this justified a larger investment of funds. More as a nod to the good old days more than anything else I bought ten stainless steel spiles to replace my plastic spiles. It is true that the plastic spiles will break sooner or later (being plastic) and the metal spiles will last forever(ish), so one could make the argument that eventually the much more expensive metal spiles will pay for themselves. But I suspect that the number of seasons of use required to pass the break-even point would probably be my lifetime. So the spiles upgrade changed nothing about the collection process and was mostly the expression of a certain idealism. Let's just imagine that my children will carry on after me, and it was all worth it as the generations continue to use those enduring stainless steel spiles.
Joking aside, I did some other improvements which greatly helped the sap boiling process. I invested in a three-burner outdoor propane camp stove which puts out far more BTUs (heat) then my kitchen stove. Looking to the future, I made sure it was of the right size and shape to be used with a evaporator pan, but for this year I stuck with my two huge canning pots. Because I was still using the inefficient pots the evaporation process was still longer than it otherwise might have been, but it was a lot faster than it had been last year using primarily the wood stove. Of course this meant it took one canister of propane for each batch of syrup, but I figured the cost was about $20 per gallon for processing the maple syrup. Not quite as frugal as getting the maple syrup for practically free (cost of firewood), but still a lot cheaper than what it would cost to purchase the equivalent amount of maple syrup from the store.
I have another idealism dream of constructing a sap house and a wood fueled evaporation system. Cue visions of my rustic sugar shack. I imagine that rustic building with the smoke and steam rising up in the late winter light, the cheery fire cackling, steam billowing on the crisp air. Hmmm. Add the sound of wood be chopped. I can conjure these awfully good visions. But not today. Not this year. Maybe never. The adult realist in me says, “How much sap would you need to process to justify all that?” But a man can dream.
The second thing which I did was upgrade my maple syrup storage and collection. I bought some food grade five gallon buckets and used the majority for storage during the week so I could stash my sap in a snow bank and not freeze it in my chest freezer. The freezing did preserve my sap from spoilage but also meant I had to melt all the sap again before boiling which add a lot of time to the evaporation phase. The cost of food grade five gallon buckets is a lot more than you might expect so I wasn't able to buy as many as I wanted. But the two large buckets I was able to hang on some of the trees helped my collection, and between them and using some other larger storage containers which could hold more than the gallon milk jugs of last year I was able to increase my collection efficiency. As a result of all these things I was able to collect more and boil down faster.
The result of my improvements is that the sap boiling went more smoothly, and faster. Last year every sap boil went late into the night—infamously, one sap boil went to 4AM if I remember right, and that was brutal. This year I finished every boil before midnight, and two of them I finished by around 9PM. This felt sane. This felt doable. An added bonus is that in the first year I made three gallons of syrup, and this year I made 3 and 1/2 gallons in even better time. Since I had 1/2 gallon left over from last year I decided my greater abundance was enough and called it quits before the season ran out. I think I am starting to figure this thing out.
The season is over now, and I am looking ahead. There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to keep expanding until I was able to produce enough syrup to have some to sell. Another part of me questions how reasonable that kind of venture would be, and to what real purpose, at this stage in my life. I don't have a huge margin of time to work with, and if I make the operation too big it could become a burden regardless of whether their is profit involved. Going above a certain size operation would require being self-employed to have the kind of free time necessary. I don't foresee that in the future. However, as our own family grows, and our consumption of maple syrup expands, there will be room for some growth in my operation. I would like to set up to an actual evaporator because that would make the entire process much more efficient.
Those things are for the future. For today, I enjoy what I havel learned, and we all enjoy the fruit of my labor, and the trees bounty. I have a new marker of Spring’s coming, and a reminder that in even the darkest seasons there can be a bounty coming.
Postscript: I would like to say every year only brings improvement, but 2024 had the distinction of being the first year I accidentally boiled over a pot and lost a batch of maple syrup. I still made a decent amount, but that year I could always think about how much more there would ahve been, if only I had not lost some. That’s life too—you have to learn to live with your mistakes.