MAPLE SUGAR TIME

Maple Sugar Time

For years one of the first signs of spring here in N.E. Ohio was that of metal buckets with tin tent like tops attached to sugar maples in woods and front yards along the roads. Now except for some traditionalists or those who only have a few trees to tap, clear or blue tubing have replaced the buckets.

Most of us in the north have grown tired of winter and the temperamental weather teasing us with warmer and sunny days only to plunge back into cold and cloudy days. But this weather is perfect for maple farmers. As days warm up slightly, the sap rises and is held there during the freezing nights. When it warms up again in the morning, the tree releases the sap and pressure forces it out of the tap into the tubing or bucket.

When I was a young child, my Grandpa Jones made maple syrup every year in an old sugar house beyond his fields next to the woods. The building was very old of silvered wood with gaps between many of the boards. In earlier years horses would have hauled the sled through the wooded paths to collect the sap from tin buckets then poured into large barrels on the back of the sled. By my time it was a Farmall tractor that hauled the sled. My father and uncles helped my grandpa collect the maple sap and watch over it boiling in a large flat metal pan over a fire kept constantly fed so it wouldn’t go out. They probably took turns. I’m not sure how my dad and uncles who had jobs managed it. As a child, my brother Jerry sometimes joined them, and he said they sat around in the evenings when it was their time playing cards, talking and drinking coffee and eating food they’d cooked on the fire under the boiling sap.

When my oldest son, John, was a teenager, he and his friend Randy from across the road decided to make maple syrup. Using milk jugs and some taps they had, they gathered sap. The first batch was to be Randy’s and it was boiled somewhere behind his house. Now it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup so I don’t imagine they got much more than a pint if that. Then it was John’s turn to try, but the sap had to be boiled in a pot on our electric stove. I was in charge of that since he had to go to school, and I only boiled it in the daytime.

The first batch was coming along nicely when a friend stopped in. We were chatting when I smelled something burning. The sap had passed the syrup stage and was now burned on the bottom of the pot. 

So John and Randy started gathering more sap and this time I watched over it carefully. That is until my parents and younger siblings came for Sunday dinner. I had taken the pot of almost maple syrup off the stove and set it aside while cooking the dinner. Unfortunately, one of my kitchen helpers cleaning up dumped it down the drain because they didn’t know what it was. That was our last attempt at making maple syrup, but not the last time we celebrated maple syrup season.

For several weekends, there is a Maple Madness Driving Tour of various sugar houses and other events within easy driving distance. For years my family and I went to these various places and when they were gone, a friend and I often went. Included in this was always a pancake and sausage all day breakfast with maple syrup, of course, put on by a local fire department or some other organization raising money. I haven’t been in years, but just maybe this year I’ll go again.

How do they celebrate the coming of Spring in your neck of the woods?