Geoff writes about sugar mapling

Geoff Gevalt, former BJ staffer now living in Vermont, writes a blog in conjunction with his Young Writers Project described in earlier posts here. We thought you might like to read Geoff’s post today about maple sugaring. Here it is:

The trees are tapped, the buckets are up and their covers are stacked with snow. We have two new feet of snow, and it’s 18 degrees. Tomorrow it is supposed to go down below zero.A week ago Sunday it was 40 and sunny and climbed to near 50 the next day. We had a mini run, enough to fill one barrel but not enough to boil. Strange season. I suspect that when the sap starts running it will go fast. And it will be a short season.

We’ll see. More when we actually get started.

A quick story:

Maple sugaring is all about getting bigger, adding more taps, buying new equipment. I’ve fallen prey. We started with a stainless steel pot on an open fire. My aunt, God bless her, gave me a nice check when I turned 50 — “10 bucks for every year,” she said. And she insisted I buy something useless, something that I wanted. “If I find out you bought food or paid a bill, I’ll be angry,” she said. There was no messing with Ruth, so I did what I was told and bought a nice 24" by 33" evaporator pan.

Each year I’d build an “arch” or fire box out of cement blocks. Last couple of years, I added some firebrick inside. It was a royal pain in the ass. Once the ground settled, so would the arch and I was rebuilding it every day.

Enough, I said. In honor of the passing of Ruth and my mom, I splurged and bought a new (bigger) pan AND a metal arch. Slicker than … well, slick. In fact it sits awaiting its christening. So you don’t think I’m totally extravagant, I’ll tell you I HAD to buy a new pan since I fried the old one last year while napping inside in front of a DVD the kids were watching. So there, now you know I’m not extravagant. Just stupid.

Anyways, I bought this new rig from my friend Ricky up at Goodrich’s Maple Farm. Ricky used to have his equipment shed with Danforth’s in East Montpelier, but he sold out to Glenn Goodrich up in Cabot. So I wandered up one day and bought a new pan. I regretted it almost as soon as I got home and within a week was back up there buying the entire unit. (Now you KNOW I’m stupid.)

The fun part was running into Glenn Goodrich. He started out with 25 taps, he said, “just like you.”

“How many you have now?”

“20,000.”

No kidding. He has an operation like you can’t believe. The evaporator is enclosed and resembled a sawed off Greyhound bus. Everything is recycled; he’s got the steam winding up through to warm an extra pan on top which about 15 feet in the air. He’s got pumps that shoot air into copper pipes with pin holes to get the sap bubbling — it gets it hotter quicker. He uses reverse osmosis which removes much of the water and so he starts off boiling a condensed sap to begin with. And get this, he syphons off the condensed steam AND the water from the sap, stores it and is awaiting FDA approval to sell it as bottled water.

Now that’s Yankee ingenuity.

I will say right here and now I will not, not ever, have 20,000 taps. Count on it.

Click on the top photo to enlarge for better view.