Sap run, finally, I hope.
March 25, 2013
40 litres of partially-boiled sap had sat for two weeks since the last run, and the grad students in the Queen’s Biology Department were eager to visit the bush Saturday as part of their celebration of Roz’s completion of her Phd. Trouble was, a wicked north wind chilled the woods so that only the buckets on the south side of sheltered trees would actually run.
So I lugged the two, 25 litre covered pails from the shop to the shack, then heaved them up onto the counter. Which promptly collapsed under the weight. Oops. One pail punctured. Poured the sap into the pan. No real harm done. Turns out lag bolts, however sturdy they may look from the outside, must be longer than 1″ if they are to hold 1/4″ steel angle irons to pine 2X4’s. Four longer screws solved the problem and the large oak boards, freshly planed for the occasion, became a bottling counter once again.
With a limited quantity of fluid in the pan I had to time the finishing boil quite carefully, or I’d run dry and face the ignominy of adding tap water to my hard-earned maple syrup. But the fire added cheer to the sugar shack, and soon everyone was gathered round, quaffing mugs of Canada tea and shooting portraits of each other through the steam. Visitors make Canada tea by sneaking over to the tap on the pan for a bit of vigorously boiling sap drained over a tea bag. The sugar content of the sap was a little high today — Roz renamed it “diabetea” — so Charlie dusted off a chrome kettle from behind the stove in the shop and boiled some water to dilute the sugar. This worked.
An expedition to the bush produced much activity and many pictures, but only a little sap. Nonetheless, we had a good afternoon and the crew headed off to Elbow Lake for a dinner party. The pan survived to boil another day.
Sunday’s run was again hampered by the north wind, though it looks as though things will get serious today and through the rest of this week. Now, if I could only find my BRIX meter to test the sugar content of the syrup….
Photographer Robert Ewart was along:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rewart/sets/72157633074672159/
Polaris Ranger shootout: 2WD vs 4WD in snow
March 10, 2013
Yesterday Tony brought his 2003 Ranger 500 to the farm and drove it around the trails in the woods I had established with my Massey Ferguson 35 and winch for hauling out logs. The wide body on full-sized Rangers may be a pain to fit onto a trailer, but the wheels fit nicely into a tractor track through deep snow. In anticipation of sugar making activities I had dragged the blade on the winch through the trails where the snow was very deep to provide ground clearance for the Rangers. Tony’s new to offroad driving so he wasn’t as impressed as I was by the 500’s ability to navigate sections that had stuck my 2004 2WD Ranger TM during the previous week.
Then we used the 500 to do something none of my toys could handle: move sugar-making equipment from the basement of the stone house up to the sugar shack. The 500 could move around in/on corn snow that had left the TM royally stuck. Just for the record, a standard 3/8″ dock line of the sort I use in summer is not strong enough to tow a Ranger when it won’t go any more on its own power. I stretched one past its breaking point twice with my Bolens 4WD tractor, then went with a prefab towing line out of yellow nylon which worked fine.
The first thing I tried with Tony’s Ranger was a slide down the hill. Why not? At full throttle off the top of the hill by the brick house we planed 600 feet down the slope until I could pick up a tractor trail back to the barn. Tony was a bit wide-eyed during the descent, but the machine worked fine in the granular snow.
After loading the gear in the deep corn around the south side of the house the 500 couldn’t back up the slope to get to the driveway, so I just booted it back down the hill and picked up the previous track across the field and up by the barn. It was an exhilarating ride for two guys, a dog, and a precious and fragile bit of kit, the boiling pan.
Eight 16 litre pails of water made another trip. Well, nine, but one didn’t have a lid, so Tony only filled it 2/3 full. Away we went. It was still more than half-full when we got to the shack. We didn’t get wet because of the rear windshield/stern cover. Pretty good ride with a partial load. Interestingly, with the extra 300 lb in the bed the 500 didn’t plane over the corn snow. The back wheels had to dig their way through. The 30 hp engine seems well suited to the chassis in tough going. I remained in high range throughout these adventures, of course, with the throttle pegged to the floorboards.
This week I plan to keep the 500 in the shed as a tow-truck and gather sap with the TM as long as it will do the job. If previous experience is any indicator, it will get through the syrup season just fine, floating over soggy turf which would bury heavier vehicles — even my little compact tractor, while carrying 14 pails of sap or up to nine volunteers per trip.
The TM is only 90% as capable as the 500, but its drivetrain is so simple I think it’s a better choice for multiple, inexperienced drivers.
Time to hang a few buckets
March 8, 2013
All winter I have numbed my mind with one downloaded TV series after another, waiting for the day that winter ends, that day when the first spile thunks into the first maple, and the gentle tap-tap-tap grows in the bucket.
Yesterday everything got stuck in the snow. It just wasn’t time yet. Today started even worse with the Ranger stuck on the lawn in front of the shop, but then as the sun reached its peak, it was time. I loaded up and drove back to the woodlot over streetcar ruts cast in the snow by repeated passages of the Massey Ferguson.
The sun angled down onto the bark of the maples. All I had to do was find the warm part of the tree, drill a hole, and out would drip the sap.
And so it did, thirty separate times that afternoon and twenty more the following morning. I tasted the first drops from each tap. Only two were sweet. The others tasted like bottled water.
Sap gradually becomes richer in sugar as the season wears on. The early stuff’s often only about 1% sugar. Later sap in our bush runs about 4%.
But like my grandfathers and their grandfathers before them, regardless of the paltry reward in sucrose, I felt in my bones it was time to hang some buckets and start to live again. That’s what sugar making is for.
A Very Canadian Day
February 28, 2010
The new snow had all the charm of a wet flannel shirt on a cold day. Mention of cleaning the driveway should bring visions of white, sparkling rooster tails arching to the treetops against an azure sky. What the week actually brought, however, were dull clouds and mud balls and a blower gagging out liquid snow, occasionally punctuated by a blast of gravel. There’s no satisfaction in this.
Charlie and his pals had tapped the woodlot last weekend. Of course the sap didn’t run because it was too early, but they were keen to experiment. Then on Friday it started.
So here I was with buckets overflowing in the woods and the kids coming on Sunday to make syrup. I decided I’d better pack a track around the woodlot so that they could gather with the Ranger. Two hours of work produced little gain. One area of deep slush was impassible for the tractor. Snow that you can’t pack into a road is just no good.
Then three carloads of crew showed up: Charlie, Anneli, Martin, Anne-Claire, Rob, Derek, Brian, Allison and Jeff. The sun came out and the temperature rose. Martin had acquired a large supply of 16 litre shortening pails with lids which he insisted could be installed and removed easily. He planned to gather the sap from the buckets in these containers, put the lids on, and haul them to the shanty in the back of the Ranger. Figuring I’d be soaked from slopping pails before long, I loaded Derek and Anne-Claire onto the Ranger and blasted back the crude trail to deliver the empties. The UV pawed its way over slush which had defeated the tractor. Interesting.
The crew swarmed around the maples, draining buckets into pails at a frightening pace. Where do they get the energy? Martin proved his point that the UV’s bed will hold more sap in pails than in a 50 gallon drum. They loaded them up and turned me around on the trail. Back we went to the shack to try out the new arch Peter Myers had made for us.
Fire-starter Rob laid a work of art in the cavernous firebox and set it alight. Before long the sap began to boil and we retired to the house for the 3 o’clock Gold Medal Hockey Game. We calculated that the optimum time to refill the firebox was every twenty minutes, so stokers alternated throughout the game. The arch worked very well.
Derek commented: “Here we are, boiling maple syrup, eating Tim Horton’s and watching a gold medal hockey game. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more Canadian.” Bet and Mom served a buffet during the third period.
Then the U.S. tied the game with a few seconds left.
I could taste the irony. Disasters travel in threes, right? I didn’t want #3 to be a U.S. victory, but I particularly didn’t want to have to admit that the pan burned dry because the game went into overtime. Out I went to check, and surely enough, the sap was down to ½”, a critical level. We quickly lifted the pan off the fire and returned to the game.
On our way back in to the house, Martin quipped: “If ever there was an appropriate time to let the pan run dry, it would be during overtime in a gold medal game.” But there’s never an appropriate time for that.
Surely enough, with disaster #2 averted, #3 didn’t happen, either. Crosby fired a blind shot at the net and Miller missed it. Canada had won gold.
Anne-Claire: “You couldn’t have scripted a better ending than Crosby getting the winning goal in overtime. When he was a shy teenager, I once served him a steak at The Keg in Halifax.”
Probably we’ll all remember where we were when Crosby fired the shot. We’ll have a hard time avoiding the day’s photos. Many of the crew had cameras along, and the light was good.
The kids may have tapped way too early and the snow was a drag, but we had a great afternoon. I wonder if some of them will come upon these photos in twenty or thirty years and marvel at the youth, vigour and beauty the camera captured in them on this day.
Check out Rob Ewart’s outstanding photos of the day:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rewart/4397837947/in/set-72157623383980467/
Ten things I have learned from a week of sugar-making
March 22, 2009
1. Young adults are night-owls. Starting work at 7:30 p.m., gathering sap by headlights and boiling all night? That seems normal for these guys. They never seem to tire. Neither do they seem aware of their host’s deep, neurotic need to watch a Senators’ game and find an early bed. What’s more, they seem ever more enthusiastic about the project, constantly planning improvements.
2. Nilex makes an outstanding filter for syrup. Martin brought this scrap of fabric from a bolt of the stuff his father used to concentrate plankton in sea water. It’s a closely-woven nylon fabric which is then pressed between two hot rollers to provide a predictable size of mesh. Used with a dinner-napkin pre-filter, it made my cheesecloth-filtered product look laughable by comparison. Yesterday Martin checked out a competitor’s product at the Kingston Market. The bottles he examined were quite cloudy. The vendor told Martin that they were having trouble getting the sugar sand out of their product with their pressure-filter system, and filtering the syrup is a big problem. I wonder if they have heard of Nilex.
3. Boiling sap over an open fire takes a lot of fuel. I’ve progressed from raiding the woodpile to collecting fallen ironwoods and cutting them into three-foot lengths. They provide a hot fire and reach well back into the arch. If a log extends too far, though, say into the end of the stove pipe, a miserable evening of smoky fire will ensue. Clay makes quite a good emergency mortar to seal up gaping holes in the “firebox”, but it doesn’t make a lot of difference if the pipe is blocked.
4. North winds are unpleasant for sap boiling. I think I see why a sugar shack would be a good investment. It’s no fun at all stoking a fire while the smoke blows back at you.
5. Some sap isn’t very sweet. Martin was astounded when he bottled the second batch. Boiled from a full drum of sap, he decanted six litres of fine, thick syrup. The previous batch produced seven litres, but we had boiled about two and a half drums of sap to get it. The early sap hadn’t tasted sweet at the tree, and I guess it wasn’t.
6. A gas barbecue isn’t much good for boiling syrup. I passed a leisurely afternoon trying to finish a small batch. The heat is all wrong for the job and when I dumped in some milk to purify the syrup, it wasn’t boiling hard enough to congeal the milk properly and I ended up with a very tasty, watery product with a great deal of sediment in the bottom of the bottles. It tasted exquisite on waffles, on the other hand. I insist that thinner syrup tastes better and soaks into pancakes with less waste than the full-strength stuff.
7. A 110,000 btu deep fryer does a great job finishing syrup. Charlie quickly discovered that “the Binford Inferno” in fact has very precise controls. With a sheet-metal wind screen, it has proven a fast and thrifty implement for the finishing of the syrup.
8. A large maple syrup expresso latte is a great deal too much of everything. With all of that tasting, tasting, tasting, my sweet tooth has gotten a real workout. Waffles several times a day aren’t so bad, but I mustn’t try thinning over-strong coffee with maple syrup ever again. It took several hours, two loads of ironwood cut and delivered, and two trailer-loads of planer shavings hauled away to burn off the sugar buzz.
9. The Polaris Ranger has a way of making itself indispensable before anyone notices. It carries the barrel to gather the sap. It hauls the firewood. It makes many trips back to the woodlot to check to see if the sap is running. The headlights are doing far more work than they should. Its relatively light weight and large tires float it over thawing turf into which a tractor would sink. It wades through puddles very well. It’s everywhere, and everyone needs it, most of the time. We learned that it’s important to check if any hoses are attached before zooming off on the next errand.
10. Syrup from the maples on Young’s Hill tastes wonderful. Back when he was persuading me to take on the syrup project, Martin sent me a couple of research documents on the use of black walnut sap for syrup production in Kentucky. In blind taste tests professionals unanimously rated regular table syrup superior to both the maple and walnut syrups produced by the crew. Perhaps Kentucky syrup just doesn’t taste very good. To illustrate my point I gave the boys a sample of some poor-quality maple syrup I found in my mother’s fridge. Their faces dropped. Then the grimmaces started. Descriptors such as “used motor oil” and “aftertaste of licorice” popped up. Nobody took a second taste. Not all syrup tastes good, but the deep red ambrosia Charlie and Martin produce in a pan over an open fire in our yard is a delight to the senses.
the Walnut Diary 