Maine maple syrup producers will bring back Maine Maple Weekend on March 27 and 28.
It was a time of sweetness. When thirsty, we drank the fresh cool sap from buckets hanging from maple trees. During the boiling, we sampled the mixture as it matured. Later, we tasted the finished syrup, dropped on clean snow. The solidified maple candy had the intense flavor of the maple with a smoky undertone.
Sugaring started in late February and lasted until the weather warmed in the first weeks of April. It was a thrilling time for a five-year-old boy, as maple sugar season signaled the first hint of spring. Snow was melting as warm days followed wintry nights.
The building we called “Sap Camp” was a hip-roofed, one-car garage Dad had moved to the top of a small hill overlooking the farm and next to a lane leading into the maple orchard. Snuggled in among the maples with the two swing-doors overlooking the meadow, it was a pleasant place to spend an afternoon of tending the fire and sampling the emerging sweet syrup.
We carried sap from the tapped maple trees to the camp in five-gallon buckets and poured it into two pans arranged in tandem over the stone arch dad had built. Once we had collected enough sap and the pans were about half full, we built a fire in the fire pit. Soon billows of sweet-smelling steam mixed with smoke from the fire would rise from the two pans and fill the camp with a smoky-sweet aroma.
There was constant activity at the sap camp during the time the trees were producing. We maintained the fire under the pans at just the right temperature to keep the sap boiling, but not enough to burn the sweet syrup that was emerging. The pan over the fire boiled the hardest while the rear pan replenished it. We would then refill the rear pan with fresh sap from the trees. It took a lot of wood to reduce forty gallons of sap to a gallon of syrup. We dragged wood from the pile, buck sawed it and split it with an axe to fit the length of the fire pit.
It was always late in the evening after barn chores and supper was over. We reduced the fire as we brought the syrup to a finish, then dipped and filtered it into gallon tin jugs with screw-on caps.
Our young family was trying to eke out a living while developing a farm. The added income from 70 or 80 gallons of maple syrup at five dollars a gallon paid for the fertilizer and seed for the summer crops. Dad did all the hard work in the early years. We boys were young and didn’t know about hard times. We enjoyed staying up late in that old sap camp lighted up by a kerosene lantern and the glow from the fire pit under the pans.
When we were older, my two brothers and I would experience aching muscles from carrying buckets of sap from the far reaches of the maple orchard. I guess it was then that we realized that our teamwork was part of the sweetness.
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