I’m not quite sure how to do this, but, I want to acknowledge that there’s kind of a lot of terrifying shit going on. I recognize and acknowledge that even in such times, we all need to chop wood/carry water, and that there’s obviously nothing wrong in taking comfort in the domestic and the comfortable. It just feels extremely weird to be assembling a post on my anodyne, cottagecore hobbies at such a time, especially when I have about a dozen half-written posts burning a hole in my Google Drive relating to various aspects of the Big Stuff happening right now. Those thoughts deserve to be polished before I put them out Here, though, and at the same time I want to stick to my goal of posting at least once a month. And maybe hearing about my anodyne, cottagecore hobbies will be in any way comforting to someone. Anyway, here goes.
Maple sugaring went quite well! The weather, despite some turbulence (surprise, here’s a foot of snow overnight, in the middle of March, rapidly followed by 70 degree temps!) stayed cool enough to give us a nice long sugaring season before bud break – which I believe still hasn’t happened quite yet, but should any day. (Bud break is when dormant buds behind to wake up and you can see bits of green start of appear; when this happens – or maybe because of it? I am not sure on the flow of causation here – the tree alters the chemical composition of the sap to better meet the needs of growing, young leaves. The changes mean that the sap turns bitter and unpalatable, known by the strangely cute term “buddy sap”.) About a week ago I noticed when I sampled the latest batch of sap that it was noticeably less sweet than it had been earlier in the season, and the flow rate slowed down dramatically over the last few days, so we decided to call it for the year and pulled out the taps.
We finished off our very first batch of syrup almost a month ago now, quite on accident. When finishing off syrup – which just means the last stretch of boiling before hitting the right concentration of syrup – there’s a point just as you achieve syrup consistency where it suddenly starts foaming up very quickly, and if you are not paying quite close attention, can quite easily overflow even a relatively large container.
Mistakes were made, we weren’t paying enough attention and we lost maybe a quarter pint (it’s hard to gauge volume when it’s in a spreading pool on your stovetop). I was quite upset for about ten minutes, but I got over it, and we have chalked this up to being an Important Lesson and an Offering to the Kitchen Gods. We didn’t have any further unfortunate incidents, so clearly the sacrifice worked.
Minor setbacks aside, we ended the sugaring season with about nine pints in jars. We could have done water bath canning and made it all shelf-stable, but….meh, we have refrigerator space. If we get really motivated we could still reboil it and can it.
You’ll note in the photo above that there’s a white sediment collecting at the bottom of the jars. This is what’s called niter, or maple sand. Rather infuriatingly, I’ve seen some homesteader influencer type videos where the creator confidently declared that this substance is crystalized sugar, which is absolute bullshit. Sap has plenty of other stuff in it besides sugar, even before bud break; the white precipitate is largely made up of calcium and magnesium. It’s edible and harmless, just not super aesthetically pleasing, so it’s filtered out of commercially produced and packaged syrup. It doesn’t bother us, though, and we are working with such small quantities that I think we’d lose a meaningful amount of our syrup if we filtered it, just due to amount retained/lost in the filter itself. I actually kind of weirdly like it; it has no flavor, and when you get down to the bottom of the jar, you just end up with sort of a very slightly grainy paste consistency that spreads very nicely on a toasted bagel.
We did learn a couple things during this sugaring season – mostly about what sorts of things work to weigh down the sap collection container in 70mpg wind gusts – but overall the process is….strangely doable? Weirdly manageable? It’s time consuming and there are certainly ways you can run into trouble – like my parents’ neighbors, who apparently boiled so much sap in their kitchen so quickly that the moisture did serious damage to their kitchen and they had to get all the drywall replaced – but those issues are avoidable with some common sense. I highly recommend it to anyone who has a bit of time, an appropriate tree, and any degree of sweet tooth. There is nothing quite as tasty as french toast served with your own homemade syrup.
Sugaring season’s end dovetailed nicely with our window for early spring garden prep. This week I’ve gotten some last minute pear tree trimming in and worked on cleaning out dead plants from some of the garden beds; tonight I set up my first tray of seedlings. Need to start another tray or two worth of seeds, see about getting some hazelnut shrubs ordered, and decide what my strategy is going to be for attacking the invasive Scilla this year.
As never-ending and frustrating as gardening can be, it’s comforting and distracting to have such a wide menu of tasks open to me. Things will slip, some things may just get away from me entirely (this is at least the third year I have wanted to get hazelnuts in), but that’s okay – there will always be more to do than I can handle, and still, somehow, the things I do get done will be enough to matter.
That’s probably a good lesson for me to carry with me out of the garden and into the rest of my life, particularly right now. I shall endeavor to do so.
Trash Panda Druiding 