Maple Sugar Season

This is Edna Mae's thoughts on making maple syrup on the farm:

Maple Syrup

" Every year when the first warm days came in late February or March I still find myself thinking of maple sugar.  Maple sap will soon start flowing which means the sugar bush will soon be tapped and the sweet, hard to describe strange aroma will once more arise to the sky through the shanty ventilator or the not too tight siding.  Then I remember running the half mile home from school to go back to the shanty where Dad and Grandpa Bradley would be boiling the sap down in the 20 to 30 foot long evaporator."

1950 Sugar Shanty

1957 Sugar Shanty

2000 Sugar Shanty

2007 Sugar Shanty

"This consisted of three shallow pans set side by side on a long fire box that gradually became more shallow as it went back to the chimney.  The first pan would be over the hottest fire this way, the middle pan would get a lower heat and the last pan a little less... as the liquid progressed from one to the other it would become thicker.  As it reached the final pan Dad or Grandpa would keep testing the liquid for weight as it had to be 11lbs per gallon.  Then it was time to run the syrup off through felt filters into 10 gallon milk cans to be taken to the house.  Here it would be put into 1 gallon cans, labeled with the Bradley label ready to be sold at $5.00 a gallon.  Last year (1989) the price was $25.00 a gallon for 100% pure maple syrup.  Maybe I got the cart before the horse because I forgot to tell you how we gathered all that sap from the hard rock maple ... Dad would drill a hole 2 inches deep and insert a metal spile into the sapwood and hang a metal pail on the spile. "

Spile

"There might be as many as four pails on the larger trees.  In the past 30 years farmers have run plastic gravity piping from the spiles directly to the storage tank in the sugar shanty, the latest improvement.  The way we did it dates back to the late 1600's.  Everyday Jerry and I helped with this.  Dad and Grandpa would empty these pails into larger milk pails to empty into the gathering tank through a screening device to remove insects, twigs etc. that might be in the sap.  The gathering tank set on a "mud boat" or a low sled, drawn by a team of horses.  When the tank was filled the horses would pull the boat up onto a ramp on one side of the shanty where a pipe that came out of the bottom of the tank would be lowered into the opening in the wall above the large storage tank to let the sap flow into this tank which was on a high platform above the evaporator.   Everything moved from one area by gravity through siphons into the evaporator as well as in the evaporator where each pan was a little lower than the proceeding one.  Sometimes in the house we would boil smaller amounts of the syrup until it would sugar when stirred in a dish.  At this stage we would all take a small dish and make our own candy always called maple sugar to each with either crackers or hot biscuits.   This would be a great party treat in the spring.  Or if there was fresh clean snow (sugar snows did occur) we would drip some on pans of snow and it made maple taffy.  These parties were known as sugaring off parties.  Oh, the days in the sugar bush were busy ones indeed but I miss those days when early spring arrives. "

"Today maple sugar is a very expensive luxury if it is 100% pure maple.    This has come about because of the use of rock maple in making furniture thus cutting many of the trees.  Also the gypsy moth has killed so many of the trees it has brought about the shipping of syrup from Michigan and Ohio to big syrup companies in Vermont thus losing for us in part the count on how much maple syrup we are producing currently."