For the past few years, we’ve come to be friends with Sue Baker, the woman who owns the sugarbush we rent in strafford for making maple syrup. We’ve built up that maple syrup business from the 700 taps her late husband sugared up to about 2,000 today. All along, we’ve been working with her to suss out how to best permanently preserve this working maple syrup operation and amazing wildlife habitat. Last week, it all finally came to pass, as she signed a conservation easement with the Upper Valley Land Trust. The 212 acre lot will now permanently serve Strafford and Thetford Vermont as a diverse set of habitats and forested spaces.

Border Collie Fetching Sue's Xmas Tree Just Prior to Easement

The easement also included a good deal of flexibility for making maple syrup or other serious agricultural pursuits on the property, which means that over generations, a wider population can own and steward this property, allowing it to pay for itself in a sustainable fashion. We feel very, very priviledged to be the next couple to help protect the property. Working a piece of land like this for maple syrup quickly allows it to work into your blood. We are all lucky that in Vermont there are many Sue Bakers out there keeping the state green.

Building on our maple syrup keg concept from some months ago, Ellie and I installed a system the new counter top that sits on our dishwasher. For less than $50, we purchased the hardware needed to have a professional draft beer tap hooked into a 13 gallon keg of bulk maple syrup sitting under our sink. Pressured up to 500 pounds per square inch, this guy will give us a year’s supply of maple syrup on demand.

We designed this originally for some of our small- and medium-scaled food manufacturer clients – folks like Ola Granola and Red Kite Candies, who use a significant amount of our maple syrup for their yummy products, and find it difficult to handle large barrels in their kitchen facilities. It turned out, though, that while the flow of maple syrup is fine for personal use, it’s too slow for efficient application when drawing a few cups at a time. But now we’re getting interest from folks looking to install a draft maple syrup system in their own kitchens. Nothing Vermontier than maple syrup on tap.

We planned to put it up at the end of the summer, when we first finished the new maple syrup barn, but of course, stuff intervened. We wound up heaving this 600-gallon monster steel tank up into the maple syrup storage loft only after the first snows had come, making it all the harder and heavier. The opening up there was built with this tank in mind (as well as bringing up 55 gallon drums of maple syrup), but that didn’t stop me and Robert from arguing whether it would or wouldn’t actually fit when the moment came. In the end it did, but not with much in the way of room for error.

Robert and I heaved it up onto its small side and lifted it over our heads to the point where the boys could grasp it from above. Problem was, they couldn’t quite reach down all the way to the tank, even standing on its side, so one had to hold the other out the window a bit to grab a hold. It was not a pleasant site to see when standing below the tank pushing upward with all one’s might.

Somehow they managed, man-handling the tank to stick straight out so as to fit inside. Heard lots of grunting and scuffling up in there. While transfixed by this, stairing up at the rising tank, it occured to me that standing 16 feet below this precarious situation wasn’t too clever. Had it fallen on my head, I probably would have dented it. So I stepped aside and took these photos while they walked the tank all the way into the barn’s second floor.

This tank will hold the sap coming down from Hubbard Hill, our smaller bush with 550 trees. We have a new vacuum (or new to us at least) to set up, and that’ll keep us in plumbing for a few weeks to come. On the other side of the loft, we store the large barrels of finished bulk and wholesale maple syrup.

Common sense may say otherwise, but fall is the time maple syrup makers’ minds turn to thoughts of making even more maple syrup. They see beautiful yellow lines of sugar maple trees yet untapped for lack of that one last roll of 5/16th inch line last year. Over the summer, the memory metastasizes into schemes. Those schemes get exaggerated into actual maple syrup plans, and finally, you find yourself driving down I-91 with a trailer load of one inch mainline wondering just how gullible your friends might be when you try to get them to help you put it all up for just a couple bottles of maple syrup.

Running lines this time of year exposes you to the most beautiful views that don’t make Vermont Life magazine. Images of towering cloud systems moving too fast between close hills, trees losing large portions of their leaves all in a moment with the first strong gust of the fall. If gray days sold tourism, you’d see all of this on the postcards streaming from Vermont, but they don’t. These days are for farmers and maple syrup makers.

Coming down I-91 and turning into the Thetford exit, I turned away from home, heading up Five Corners Road where some friends of mine once lived, where I knew they had a view of my maple syrup operation. I needed the distance view to contemplate where the maples are, and where the topography is, and where that happy combination can marry them together, letting me use that line I’m hauling to carry maple syrup sap down to where we can collect it in March.

I set in my rig for a minute or two looking at this view. This time of year is one of a couple where you can tell the maples from the rest of the forest because they turn more quickly, and to a distinctive yellow. It’s a great scouting technique, and makes for a great excuse to do some productive driving around town in the turn of the fall, figuring out who might own some unused maples the rights to which might be prized free with some well placed maple syrup.

I have not yet met the man who bought the house of my friends, and I realize it must look odd, were someone to see me, looking past his home on the side of the road off into space.

The man who farms across the street from this house is a friend of mine. He, it turns out, helped make maple syrup some 50 or 60 years ago on the same bush I sugar, driving horses uphill to the old sugar shack on top. He makes maple syrup nowadays from the trees along this road. My friends who once lived here across from him told me the story of when they made the mistake of mentioning to this sugarmaker that his new sugarlines didn’t quite have the same character that the buckets once did with their “plinks” and “planks” as the afternoon droplets fell into the galvanized steel pails. They were mortified to see that the next day he’d replaced his new lines with the old buckets by their house, just for them. It’s that sort of place still.

A group of bowhunters looks to be eying me from where the trees meet the field. I start the rig and move on, as they probably think that I’m scouting that eight-pointer they didn’t get last year (and won’t get this year). I can’t fool with deer because I’m a fool for the maple syrup, but that’s not comfort for them.

Having a big log pile reminds me of being 16 back when I had my dad’s car and had just filled up the gas tank. So many options; so much potential. I have that feeling now as I look across the street from my house at this big, honking pile of hardwood. We took about 24 cord of it off the lot that surrounds the working sugarhouse.

Last year we managed to burn about a dozen cord of wood in the process of making 520 gallons of maple syrup. We’ll have a total between 30 and 40 cord by the time we’re done. Might be enough for two years, then again, maybe we’ll get some folks sending us some additional sap.

I’ll be heading up to Vershire tomorrow morning to pick up some old tin roofing a friend is setting aside as he takes down a falling farmhouse on his woodlot. Will be sure to stock him up with a good amount of maple syrup. This tin will go atop the split and stacked wood. It’s just about the best thing to help dry it out. The wood starts off about 40 percent water when it’s split. By the time it’s dry enough for my tastes, it’s gone down to between 15 and 17 percent water – about as low as wood can go in Vermont’s outdoor air. We had a doohickey with long prongs you could stick in the end of a log to tell its moisture level. It was sitting out until a friend’s twin boys came by and started to try to test each other’s moisture levels. Turns out they’re both about 85 percent water incidentally, which makes sense, as they’re twins.

In retrospect, the number of gallons of maple syrup we made last year relative to the wood we burned indicates that our pre-concentration of the sap isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be. Suggests we’re concentrating the maple sugar in that fluid only between 2 and 3 times. We’d much rather see between 5 and 6 times concentration, as that’s where we’ve been able to show consistently that the flavor remains the same after going through our reverse osmosis machine. Just for the sake of argument, if we did concentrate by 6x, then the wood we have on hand could make more than 4,000 gallons of maple syrup, if you could find the sap. That gets the mind going.