The Lay of the Land
It’s strange to be in weather this cold past the equinox. Back home, the tulips are budding and the mason bees are emerging from their cocoons, but here in Minnesota, the fallow fields are bright white in the sunlight. On our drive from the airport, Mary Ann pointed out the mountains of plowed snow in strip mall parking lots, taller than the buildings and gravel-gray.
I’m running late for a work meeting by the time we arrive at the farm, so I miss the first foray into the sugar maple forest (“sugar bush”), but despite crossing two time zones into the future, it’s still fully light out when I emerge. I’ve got a couple of coats layered over my sweater, wool socks under Xtratuf boots for the snow. I expected mud, but the ground is mostly still frozen.
Rick and Eileen have been gathering sap from the trees. Mary Ann and Bill have two different systems set up for maple tapping: the old-school pails hanging open from the taps, and a more modern system of plastic bags on metal rails that the spigots drip into. The role of both is about the same: catch the sap plinking out of the spigots tapped into the trees, and hold it until somebody comes to pick it up.
While I’ve been indoors working, they have been gathering bags and pails alike, pouring from the collectors into five-gallon buckets, which in turn get poured into fifty-gallon “refrigerators” — in this case, trash cans in the snow used as holding tanks until we’re ready to boil the syrup. The bags and pails get reset onto their taps to fill up again.
This work is not just seasonal, but highly dependent on the weather and the time of day. From the refrigerators, the sap will be pumped into a barrel on a Gator utility vehicle and driven to the sugar shack, then pumped again into another barrel that’s mounted up high. That barrel then has a gravity-feed hose which is used to fill the boiling pans, which sit in place above the big flat-topped wood stove. But each part of this process depends on a daily cycle of thaw and freeze: in the relatively warm evening, the Gator can’t make it through the muddy forest path. It needs cold, frozen ground. But other parts of the system only work when it’s warm enough, including the flow of sap through the trees.
Luckily, we’re arriving partway through the process. There’s sap already in the barrel on the sugar shack, so we fill up the boiling pans in the evening — the hose will be frozen in the morning when we come back to light the fire.
Previous: To Sugar a Maple | Next: Tapping Trees
