In areas where sugar maples and "real weather" thrives, early spring (when daytime temperatures rise up into the 40s and then sink back to the 30s at night) means it's time to tap the trees.
“It takes 40 of these gallon jugs of sap to make just one quart of maple syrup,” farmer Tom Houghton of Marlborough, NY, explained, holding up a gallon milk container filled with clear, watery sap gathered on his farm in one hand and a small jar of pure maple syrup in the other, showing how the process is done.
Visions of Vermont may first spring to mind, when folks think of real maple syrup , but according to Houghton, a sugaring industry prospered in the New York State (and in the Hudson Valley) well into the 20th century, with farmers making a decent living each year, tapping the sugar maples on their properties.
“A lot of the syrup on the commercial market actually used to come from trees in the Hudson Valley,” he explained. “But a lot of that’s changing now.”
Houghton’s fascination with sugaring didn’t actually begin in New York, however. As he explains it, an uncle in South Jersey used to tap the trees on his property and taught him how it was done.
“When we moved up here, I noticed that there were a lot of sugar maples in the area,” said Houghton. “So I just started tapping them.”
Houghton explains that, for around 17 years, has tapped the trees on about two acres of his property that has a lot of maples. The maple that’s produced is mainly for his family’s use – and for gifting to some very lucky friends.
“Mainly, we do it as an excuse to be outside at a time of year when there’s not much else to do in the yard,” he laughed. “It’s too late to shovel snow – and too early to plant anything.”
Sugaring requires temperatures that fluctuate greatly – from relative warmth during the daytime to low forties or overnight. The fluctuations, he explained, allow the sap to rise in the tree when it’s warm and then to fall back down again when it gets colder, allowing the tree to successfully to tapped, without causing it any harm.
Houghton showed the students a variety of tools that he uses for sugaring – a kit that has varied little since American Indians first discovered the sweet joys of maple syrup. After using a rough guide to see how many taps could successfully be made in a given tree’s girth, Houghton takes a hand drill and carefully bores into the bark, getting down to a “vein” under the rough coating that the sap runs through. In the “old days” he explained, they used wooden splints to hold the tap open and to hang the buckets on. The warmer it gets, the faster the sap runs, sometimes filling a whole bucket in a day. Today, Houghton explained, plastic is more likely to be used than wood.
The buckets are emptied each day and dumped into a huge kettle that is allowed to slowly bubble over a low fire, evaporating the water from the clear sap and turning it a silky, sticky, concentrated amber brown. The process is basically the same, whether it’s a big, commercial operation with a “high tech” evaporator, a small sugar shack, where a limited supply is made or a kitchen stovetop. The longer the sap boils, the more concentrated it gets – until it eventually becomes maple sugar if left on the boil.
As Houghton tapped the tree in the schoolyard, kids bunched together, vying to get a good look, fascinated by the whole process.
