Magic in a Bottle

We pulled our taps in the middle of last week and boiled our last batch of sap on Sunday afternoon. All told, we finished off just shy of three gallons of maple syrup this season; not bad for 19 taps. And the addition of the hydrometer to the tool kit (we were just using a thermometer in years past) was clutch. Sure, it makes the whole thing feel a little bit like a high school chem lab experiment, but it removes all the guess work of deciding when to call it done. It's syrup when the hydrometer says so. End of story.

The wood stove I welded this year? Well, that was a fail. It burned, and with constant fanoogling you could get a rolling boil in the pan, but turn your back for a few minutes and it would tapper off. We ended up burning a whole lot of wood for a pretty tiny amount of syrup. So it goes. We're learning. Back to the drawing board on that one. But we're already making plans to ramp up production next year. More taps, more buckets, more storage, different stove. All things to sort out next winter. But for now, on to the next project.

Sap, Steam, and Spring

The taps are in, the sun is shining, and the sap is running. This is it. This spring; the real deal. It's time to trudge through the last lingering drifts of snow collecting buckets and hauling them back to the evaporator. It's time to sit in a lawn chair in the driveway thumbing through seed catalogs and watching steam roll off the pan until sap becomes syrup. It's last year's summer sun captured and stored deep under ground, until now. Offered up again as a gift to the spring, our little harvest just a fraction skimmed off the top as life rushes back up from the roots. Maple syruping is the left parenthesis at the beginning of the growing season. The right parenthesis will come after the first killing frost in the fall when anything that wasn't done growing is knocked down and tilled in, over and done. Any project unfinished will soon be covered in snow, put to rest until the next year. But for now the season in between is open, unwritten. We talk about it in whispers. We draw maps and make lists. The possibilities of life are endless. This is it. This is spring.