Today, we pulled our 49 taps out of the maple trees. It was bittersweet. The bitter part was saying goodbye to the trees that we trudged to every evening for the last few weeks. It will be a whole year until we make those journeys again, which in some cases involve going through thickets and behind old buildings into places that don’t often see human traffic. The sweet part was that we
don’t have to go to those trees every day anymore. The evening chores suddenly seem a lot easier. The other aspect of the sweet part is inside the house, bottled into jugs and ready to be poured over pancakes.
The weather has been unseasonably warm, which led to an early and pleasant maple season. Last year we were still boiling in early April, and we were freezing while we were doing it. This year we had the lawn chairs out and, at times, it almost felt like we were kicking back and relaxing on a warm summer day. Have I mentioned that we aren’t even halfway through March yet? I’m not complaining… at least not until our fruit starts blooming too early, but that is another problem for another day.
All told we collected 428 gallons of sap. Now that the war is over, we have about 8 gallons of syrup nicely bottled into pint and quart jars. Ponder that. We sent 420 gallons of water vapor into the atmosphere. I’m pretty sure we made it rain somewhere. The general ratio given for sap to syrup is 40:1. Ours was a little worse than that. For no particular reason I am going to say it was Dad’s fault. Glad to have that off my chest.
Now that the work is done, it is time to enjoy the sweet taste of our labor. We have taken stock of our product, decided on what we want to keep for personal use and to experiment on to create maple candies and maple cream, and are happy to announce that we will be selling maple syrup this year. For those of you who may be interested in buying some, we are selling pints for $12 and quarts for $22. You can contact us through facebook or call (business number is 323-1395) or text us (if you have one of our personal numbers) or just let us know the next time we see you. If you are reading this and would be interested, but you live in Rochester, we would be more than happy to bring it up the next time we come up to visit (which we hope is soon!).
