The Unabridged And Mostly Unexaggerated Tightwad’s Guide to Maple Sugaring

Does this photo look familiar? Maybe not, given my utter lack of skills with that hipster camera application with which everyone else in the world seems so immediately adept.

You’ll have to trust that these are the same receptacles as The Containers Which Allow Us Not to Die of Thirst and the source of The Amazingly Ingenious Way to Water a Garden With Only a Pond at your Ready. Remember now?

These days, they’re serving a different, sweeter purpose. These containers, already life-savers, served a key role in what is likely the most shantytowny sugaring operation this side of the 49th Parallel.

We’re being modest with our sugaring this year, with only a dozen taps, because for the first time ever, I wasn’t wildly overambitious to the point of paralysis. Even still, S. (who I think from now on shall be herein christened as The Native… adoringly) was the one who spent the entire night up boiling. So then, please enjoy…

The Unabridged And Mostly Unexaggerated Tightwad’s Guide to Maple Sugaring

1> Figure out how you’re going to cook it.
Sap boils to syrup at a rate of 40-to-1, which is enough boiling to turn your house into a sauna for many many hours, and unless you’ve got a lot of vodka on hand, you don’t need a sauna in your house. Our last rented abode had an old wood-fired outdoor cookstove sitting on the front porch for the entirety of our tenanthood. The landlord, as it happened, was willing to get rid of it for next-to-nothing in exchange for hauling its 300-or-so pounds off of his land. And as it so happens, when someone says “not much money” and “hernia-inducing amounts of heavy lifting” in the same sentence, we hear something like “free grapes and foot massages delivered by nubile cabana boys and girls on an isolated, tourist-free Caribbean island.” We managed to get the thing to the top of the hill (how? Slowly) and it’s been wonderful enough to need its own blogh post (coming soon).

2> Figure out how to get it out of the trees
We bought used buckets for $5 a pop from these guys, along with new taps and some sort of tapping tool. It beats milk jugs or empty tuna cans.

3> Make your boyfriend go tap the trees, because you are busy at work
And while you’re being bossy, tell him to find healthy-looking trees, ones that have a little bit of clearing (I think, but we’re neophytes), which get more sun. If your boyfriend won’t do it, call me and I’ll send you mine. (No I won’t, because then he would need remasculating afterward.)

The dog doesn’t help much, despite the seeming photographic evidence to the contrary, but it sure looks like she did, right?

4> Anxiously check every morning, even though it’s very likely you’ll get almost two feet of snow the day after you tap them.
We (I mean, HE) tapped ours on the 3rd of March, and by Sunday, we could see what was either sap or rainwater starting to trickle in. On Saturday, the 12th, we gathered about 14 gallons from our 12 taps. This week it’s really starting to move: we collected 8 gallons on Monday the 14th, and another 10 on the Ides.

5> Harvest it, at long long last!
Use your water containers, or your milk jugs? I honestly have no idea how people with running water do this. I suppose normal people also have tanks or containers of some kind? It helps also if there’s a little guy with a sled willing to give the full jerry cans a ride back to your stove.

6> Now, it’s time to boil.
And boil. And boil some more. And eventually you fall asleep while your boyfriend continues to boil all night. People who know their stuff have sugarhouses with huge boilers, and can, I guess, fill up a very large pan with gallons of sap and then go play their fiddle and drink bourbon until the syrup’s done.

We are not so lucky. We have our cookstove, which is great, but whose fuelbox only really burns for 30 minutes or so at a time. Additionally, all we had for a boiling pan was my canner, which holds a couple gallons at a time. The Native set up a sort of sophisticated system filtering the gunk out using a cloth and a camping cookware saucepan, preheating what he could fit into my steamer, and boiling in the canner. He did this to all 18 gallons of our first harvest, during which we watched a handful of movies with a timer set to remind him every thirty minutes to go refill the stove. And he continued to do long after the little person and I were out.

7> Make pancakes for The Native.
Which is the least you can do after he’s stayed up all night making syrup. (It’s good. I couldn’t believe it, but it’s good! Really good!)

8> Write your friends and brag about it
Even though you’ve just admitted that The Native did most of the heavy lifting, you’ll still be the envy of everybody, and they’ll all be really nice to you in hopes of receiving a pint or two.

The original 18 gallons boiled down into a quart and a half of utter delicious:

We’re just getting into the thick of the season, and ready for a second batch of boiling tomorrow (if the past couple of days are any indication, we should have about 25 gallons harvested).  Next year I’m ready to aim for a hundred taps.

(Did you hear that?  That was the sound of The Native keeling over at the thought…)