March for Maple Syrup

Some claim that the first to discover the delight of maple syrup was the grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. Little bushy tail is a sloppy feeder though, nipping young twigs and lapping the resultant sap. Trails of these destructive habits can be found on the ground below Acer saccharum, the sugar maple tree.

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Frankly, the first human inhabitants of the cooler parts of northeastern North America were if anything worse in their eagerness to harvest the sweet sap. They whacked the bark with their stone axes, leaving a large V-shaped wound. The precious liquid was collected in hollowed-out wooden troughs. The arrival of European colonists with their metal axes and wood buckets eased the chore. Tribes of eastern woodlands recounted the story of how Glooskap, the mischief-making immortal, caused the tree sap to run thin and only thick and sweet at the end of winter. At other times of the year they had to even more laboriously and less reliably search for food. Jacques Cartier is credited by some historians for the first recorded sighting of sugar maples in the account of his third voyage to modern-day Quebec in 1540. It didn’t take the early habitants of la belle province long to learn the delights awaiting them in the sugar bush or to develop more efficient ways to tap trees and refine sap. Quebec has never looked back. Today it accounts for 75 percent of all production. Along with the neighbouring provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick this totals somewhere near 5 million U.S. gallons annually. Vermont, Maine, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Michigan add about another 1? million gallons to the harvest.

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It is only in such northerly locations that produce maple syrup. The horticulturally-minded third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson, suggested that every farmer should have a ‘maple orchard’ along with an apple one. Alas, he discovered that the maples at Monticello, his southerly country estate, resolutely failed to produce when he attempted to tap them. Was this the origin of that well-known direction, not to be a sap? Present presidential candidate please note. Tapping – boring a hole and inserting a metal spigot – should only be attempted on trees 12-inches or more in diameter at breast height. A single tap is used for such a tree with up to two taps on trees 18” or more in diameter but never more, despite old-time tales of “maple cows.” An average sugar maple produces 12 gallons of sap each season – but it takes 40 gallons to make a single gallon of syrup. Small-scale production still relies on covered pails hung on the spigot, to be collected laboriously every day. Modern, larger scale operations resort to a network of plastic tubes leading downhill to a central collecting point. Either way, this is transported to the sugar house. There the business of boiling down the sap containing an average of 3 percent sugar to syrup takes place. Don’t even think of trying this in the home kitchen: the evaporating liquid is sticky and coats everything. But how long can this go on for? In the last few decades of the 20th-century, Acer saccharum, with its immense shallow root system, was suffering due to acid rain. Climate change, bringing with it increased rainfalls, should have alleviated this. It may have done so but it or some other unknown factors are causing a ‘significant decline,’ according to research results published 21 October 2015 in the open-access journal Ecosphere.

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