The Sweetest Time of Year

Maple trees stay frozen most of the winter, but once the days get longer and the temperatures warmer, they begin to thaw and start drawing water up through their roots to get ready for the growing season. Walking home from school, we couldn’t help but notice pails hanging on the trunks of the maple trees along the road. Maple sugar time, or “sugaring off,” occurs from late February to early April when freezing nights and warmer days cause the sap to flow, although the exact timing can vary depending on the weather.

The flow of sap in our maple trees meant that spring was on its way, and with the arrival of the sap came the maple syrup and sometimes a small amount of maple cream. Around our home we had several maple trees, and each year Father tapped them to get the sap. When enough had been gathered, it was boiled into syrup. I wasn’t with him when the trees were tapped, but he used what was called a spile, which was a small, tapered spout made of metal that gets driven into the maple tree to extract the sap. Each spile had a hook from which a pail was hung from a hook on the spout. Each pail had a cover to keep out rain and snow. On the smaller trees he used one tap, but on the larger ones he usually used two: one on the front of the tree and the other on the back, which was a bit higher than the one in front. He tapped the trees at chest height, which made it easy to check the pails, and if we received more snow, the taps remained accessible.

When my brother Merle and I came home from school, we would check the pails, and when we found a full pail, we would remove it and replace it with a clean, empty one. As long as the temperature stayed above zero, the sap dripped into the pails.

The sap had a mild, sweet taste even though it was mostly water. We would carefully carry the pails of sap to the house where they were stored until Dad got home from work. When he saw that enough sap had been collected, he would dump the sap from the pails into a large kettle and boil it outside over an open fire, which removed the water, until it was reduced to syrup. The finished syrup reached very high temperatures just prior to bottling. Mother then would sterilize empty glass pint mason jars to make sure they were good and hot before filling them. Adding hot maple syrup to cold glass jars would cause the jars to shatter.The sap from our maple trees produced more than just maple syrup, which, by the way, is delicious on pancakes. Towards the end of the maple sap season, by varying the cooking and cooling times, Mother and Dad could produce small amounts of maple butter and maple cream, all yummy items. Dad would take the last of the boiled sap inside to finish the last bit of boiling under Mother’s watchful eye on the kitchen stove. Each year they usually ended up with between eight and ten pints of delicious, golden maple syrup.

The length of the sugaring season was and still depends totally upon the weather. It may last only a few weeks, or as long as six or eight weeks. As the days become increasingly warmer, and the nights get below freezing less and less often, the buds on the branches of the maple trees begin to swell, which marks the end of the maple syrup season. Chemical changes take place within the tree as baby leaves form within the buds. That’s when the sap is no longer suitable for boiling down into syrup.