March had five Sundays, and so many of those that boil down sap to make maple syrup put off their open houses a week so as to avoid having it on Easter. The man that taps my father in-law's trees, like the ones that line his driveway shown at right, did so. You'll note the metal buckets hanging at the base of these stately trees, and this being a good year, they were often emptied twice a day. The trees are bored with a drill and the spigot inserted. Many folks now pipe the sap using plastic tubing to a central collection tank - but one must be careful - further inland from us, there is so much snow that these people can't find their lines they are buried so deep.
That's Adam Rice, enveloped by steam from his evaporator. With his wife and his daughters, he uses the free time that the weather forces on his logging business to harvest sap from around his farm, some days pulling in more than a hundred gallons (and yes, it cooks down forty to one: forty gallons of sap will yield one gallon of syrup).
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More on the flip:
After the sap is collected from various places in the vicinity, it is brought to the sugarhouse, where the real action begins. The sap is pumped up to the holding tank seen at the right, where it runs via gravity into a two tank, wood fired evaporator (Adam's logging come in handy here). In the first tank the sap is boiled hard, and most of the water cooked off. In the seconded, it slowly works its way through a wereies of baffles, where it is finally drawn off at the end to be filtered, bottled and sold.
The event was very well attended, what with hot dogs, mac and cheese, baked beans and vanilla ice cream covered in - waht else - maple syrup being served in one of the Rice's barns. There were horse-drawn wagon rides for the kids, and the coes were a hit with them too.
One of the things I really love about Maine is that old-time traditions are widely celebrated still, as evidenced by the more than 100 farms listed here. (save it for next year).
Now, bring on spring and those fiddleheads!