Sugaring

It’s red letter day! Teddy and I are finally able to resume our daily walks in relative comfort. We tried it once a week or two ago. It looked okay but I froze and I think Teddy did too, he being a dog of very little hair. Today was fine, though, all melty and squishy, and Ted had a ball snuffling up all the good smells that had been locked in the snow all these months.

Our neighbors down the road are sugaring. I could see the column of wood smoke and steam all the way from the church. Steamy, smokey sugar shacks are commonplace here in Prince Edward County. The sound of distant chainsaws and the smell of woodsmoke is everywhere. Did you know that it takes 40 gallons (or more) of maple sap to make a single gallon of syrup? (Remember that next time you’re grumbling over the price of maple syrup in the grocery store!) Wood fires must be kept burning at a high temperature in order to boil the sap and render the syrup. We hope for chilly nights and days just above freezing for a good sap run.

Some folks (like our neighbors John and Catherine) get heavy into it, plumbing the trees with plastic tubing and collecting the sap in huge reservoirs, but I prefer the old fashioned way. I love the quaint idea of a bucket hanging from a spigot in a tree like they did when I was a kid. Mind you, I don’t have to tote the buckets through miles of mucky sugarbush. At my favorite vineyard, Three Dog Winery, they still practice the old ways. In their 35 acre sugarbush, they planned to hang only 50 buckets and bring them in by hand. Over the weekend during our annual maple festival, they had lots of help in the form of tourists and over-zealous school kids. I remember the warm syrup being drizzled over fresh snow as a treat when I was a little girl. I’d have hauled a hundred buckets to get it!