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jennariaSo shotboxer says to me, hey, we live in New England, the sap is running, we should go on a Maple Sugar Odyssey! And I say, Sure! Without remembering that the key feature of the Odyssey is that Odysseus wanders around kind of lost (but not entirely!) for rather a long time and with mixed success.
Okay, maybe not so mixed. I made a point out of picking up Grade A Medium Amber syrup at each and every place we went, so here are my eight little things of syrup. ...good thing I like maple syrup.
The primary problem with buying maple syrup direct is that pretty much all the small maple syrup producers are way the heck in the back of beyond. We found our first chosen stop (East Hadley Sugarhouse) fine, but got twisted around after that. Luckily, we ran across a sign that said THIS WAY TO ZAWICKI SUGARHOUSE, and followed it.
We were lucky enough to be the first ones there, so Stan (the man running it) was willing to not only sell us maple syrups, but also give us a tour of the operation. He had all kinds of fascinating information about how maple sugaring is a lot more complicated than just sticking maple sap into a pot and boiling away: what kind of setup most of them use, what kind of wood (or whether to use oil heat), how do they get the sap... Stan had this elaborate boiler that was extra heat-efficient, so Allison (who is interested in this sort of thing) came away talking about heat reclamation and what to do with all that extra boiling water. Me? Well, apparently maple syrup burns like gasoline. Stan mentioned this in the context of why they have to be careful not to over heat the syrup as they're boiling it down. Little did he know where my mind was going. (It's the murder mysteries. They'll warp the most well-regulated of minds.)
To give y'all some examples:
This is what a sugar-boiler in action looks like. Yes, there's a fuck of a lot of steam. They have to boil off something like 90 percent of the sap to get maple syrup.
This is what everyone thinks of when they think of maple sugaring - the buckets with the taps directly in the trees.
This is a (admittedly somewhat distant) picture of what they actually mostly use these days: not buckets, but hose. (The blue arrow is pointing to it, in case you can't see.) This way, so long as you make sure the hose is taut and on a downward slope, you can have several trees feeding into one container. (Also, if the sap isn't running, because the weather hasn't been properly cold at night and warm-ish during the day, like, say, this year? You can hook up a pump to the hose, and persuade the tree a bit. No harm to the tree, Stan insisted, just a bit of change in the pressure to get the sap to run on its own.
So anyway, we wended our way up to Brattleboro, and spent the night there. Our first stop on Sunday morning, we decided, was going to be a place called Sweet Maple Alpacas, also in Vermont, which advertised itself as having not only maple syrup but, well, alpacas. We even found the place without too much difficulty. There were only two small problems:
(1) The sugarhouse (and alpaca farm) was on a deeply rutted dirt road.
(2) Vermont got snow more recently than we did, and it hasn't completely gone away, making it more difficult than it might be to tell exactly how deep the ditches on the side of the road are.
So we make it up the road to Sweet Maple Alpaca, and Allison pulled off to the side of the road so we could check the hours on the sugarhouse and take pictures of alpacas. Alas, the sugarhouse didn't open until noon. But alpacas! I got out, and Allison tried to start up the car again to move it.
The car would start. It just wouldn't move. In fact, as we eventually noticed, one tire was entirely off the ground.
Allison got out to try to dig at the snow with her scraper (as she didn't have anything else), whilst I ventured down the road with my camera to at least get some pictures of the alpacas.
They look so deceptively cute and fluffy, don't they.
Fortunately, me standing around caught the attention of the farmer, and he came chugging out with his little tractor, sized up the situation, hooked up Allison's car to his tractor, and had her out of the ditch in no time. And then he went chugging back to his chores, without comment on our travails, whilst I got back in the car and Allison and I headed further down the road to turn around and leave.
Alas, this is not the end of the story! Remember point 1? We didn't. Allison pulled into a driveway, and when she pulled out again, the car got stuck astride one of the ruts. We sat there for a good ten minutes, hacking at the dried mud (to no effect), pushing at the car (to slightly more effect, but not much), and trying not to contemplate having to call AAA to the back roads of Vermont at 8 AM on a Sunday morning.
Fortunately, the farmer apparently noticed that we had not passed his farm again, outward bound, and came chugging up in his little tractor again. He considered our situation, shook his head, muttered something about not being sure he could manage this one, and looked at me. "You're not from around here, are you."
"Er. No."
"Mmm." He hooked up Allison's car to his tractor, and with a few carefully timed tugs, managed to free her car from the rut. He advised her to back up further on the driveway to avoid the ruts if possible, refused my offer of payment for saving our skins twice, and chugged back off, having proved that Vermont farmers might not talk much but are clearly very nice to silly Boston peoples.
So those are the best stories from our Maple Syrup Odyssey. We may or may not do it again next year. If we do, we'll make sure to take an SUV, just in case.
shotboxer says to me, hey, we live in New England, the sap is running, we should go on a Maple Sugar Odyssey! And I say, Sure! Without remembering that the key feature of the Odyssey is that Odysseus wanders around kind of lost (but not entirely!) for rather a long time and with mixed success.Okay, maybe not so mixed. I made a point out of picking up Grade A Medium Amber syrup at each and every place we went, so here are my eight little things of syrup. ...good thing I like maple syrup.
The primary problem with buying maple syrup direct is that pretty much all the small maple syrup producers are way the heck in the back of beyond. We found our first chosen stop (East Hadley Sugarhouse) fine, but got twisted around after that. Luckily, we ran across a sign that said THIS WAY TO ZAWICKI SUGARHOUSE, and followed it.
We were lucky enough to be the first ones there, so Stan (the man running it) was willing to not only sell us maple syrups, but also give us a tour of the operation. He had all kinds of fascinating information about how maple sugaring is a lot more complicated than just sticking maple sap into a pot and boiling away: what kind of setup most of them use, what kind of wood (or whether to use oil heat), how do they get the sap... Stan had this elaborate boiler that was extra heat-efficient, so Allison (who is interested in this sort of thing) came away talking about heat reclamation and what to do with all that extra boiling water. Me? Well, apparently maple syrup burns like gasoline. Stan mentioned this in the context of why they have to be careful not to over heat the syrup as they're boiling it down. Little did he know where my mind was going. (It's the murder mysteries. They'll warp the most well-regulated of minds.)
To give y'all some examples:
This is what a sugar-boiler in action looks like. Yes, there's a fuck of a lot of steam. They have to boil off something like 90 percent of the sap to get maple syrup.
This is what everyone thinks of when they think of maple sugaring - the buckets with the taps directly in the trees.
This is a (admittedly somewhat distant) picture of what they actually mostly use these days: not buckets, but hose. (The blue arrow is pointing to it, in case you can't see.) This way, so long as you make sure the hose is taut and on a downward slope, you can have several trees feeding into one container. (Also, if the sap isn't running, because the weather hasn't been properly cold at night and warm-ish during the day, like, say, this year? You can hook up a pump to the hose, and persuade the tree a bit. No harm to the tree, Stan insisted, just a bit of change in the pressure to get the sap to run on its own.
So anyway, we wended our way up to Brattleboro, and spent the night there. Our first stop on Sunday morning, we decided, was going to be a place called Sweet Maple Alpacas, also in Vermont, which advertised itself as having not only maple syrup but, well, alpacas. We even found the place without too much difficulty. There were only two small problems:
(1) The sugarhouse (and alpaca farm) was on a deeply rutted dirt road.
(2) Vermont got snow more recently than we did, and it hasn't completely gone away, making it more difficult than it might be to tell exactly how deep the ditches on the side of the road are.
So we make it up the road to Sweet Maple Alpaca, and Allison pulled off to the side of the road so we could check the hours on the sugarhouse and take pictures of alpacas. Alas, the sugarhouse didn't open until noon. But alpacas! I got out, and Allison tried to start up the car again to move it.
The car would start. It just wouldn't move. In fact, as we eventually noticed, one tire was entirely off the ground.
Allison got out to try to dig at the snow with her scraper (as she didn't have anything else), whilst I ventured down the road with my camera to at least get some pictures of the alpacas.
They look so deceptively cute and fluffy, don't they.
Fortunately, me standing around caught the attention of the farmer, and he came chugging out with his little tractor, sized up the situation, hooked up Allison's car to his tractor, and had her out of the ditch in no time. And then he went chugging back to his chores, without comment on our travails, whilst I got back in the car and Allison and I headed further down the road to turn around and leave.
Alas, this is not the end of the story! Remember point 1? We didn't. Allison pulled into a driveway, and when she pulled out again, the car got stuck astride one of the ruts. We sat there for a good ten minutes, hacking at the dried mud (to no effect), pushing at the car (to slightly more effect, but not much), and trying not to contemplate having to call AAA to the back roads of Vermont at 8 AM on a Sunday morning.
Fortunately, the farmer apparently noticed that we had not passed his farm again, outward bound, and came chugging up in his little tractor again. He considered our situation, shook his head, muttered something about not being sure he could manage this one, and looked at me. "You're not from around here, are you."
"Er. No."
"Mmm." He hooked up Allison's car to his tractor, and with a few carefully timed tugs, managed to free her car from the rut. He advised her to back up further on the driveway to avoid the ruts if possible, refused my offer of payment for saving our skins twice, and chugged back off, having proved that Vermont farmers might not talk much but are clearly very nice to silly Boston peoples.
So those are the best stories from our Maple Syrup Odyssey. We may or may not do it again next year. If we do, we'll make sure to take an SUV, just in case.