Spring is just about here...

What is this?

Let us take a closer look...

It is sugaring season when it gets colder than freezing at night and warmer than freezing in the daytime.

We made maple syrup when we lived in Vermont. Not because we had more maple trees though. No, it was because we heated our house with a wood stove and so it was really easy to just dump the day's sap into a big stockpot on the stove.

It takes 30-40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, so collecting the sap is only half the battle. If we are not making syrup, why collect the sap? I find that it makes a very refreshing and only slightly sweet drink. I just filter the sap through a paper towel to get out any debris that might have fallen into the bucket.

In Vermont, my neighbor Joe even set-up a little wood fired sugar shack in the woods between our houses. We would share a beer or two and drag whatever wood we could find into the fire under his evaporation pan. It was great! The wood we used was too rotten to consider for use inside the house but worked fine to boil sap. An added bonus was that this work totally cleaned-up that patch of woods and made it look like a park. I think I even suggested that he put the shack in a different part of the property every year (we had about 3 acres in each of our lots). At the end of ten years, both places would have looked park-like.