Maple Math & Maple Magic

I stick my head out the window with my headlamp on. I want to howl into the waning moon wind tunnel between the barn and the house. The Reverse Osmosis machine (for future reference, RO) hums and gurgles. I see the sap collection tank, half-empty – and the concentrate bucket, half-full. The nighttime mud and the piles of fresh-split firewood and farm tools I’ll need to put away are scattered all about. The edge of the chicken run, the wall of the barn – chickens sleeping cozily therein. The March winds smash into the farm. I laugh madly and pull my head back into the house. Loose aluminum siding laying along the barn clatters and shakes in the wind. I close the window with a slam. It’s sugar season, alright!

The RO cuts my boil time in half. When you visit a sugar house on Maple Weekend, they probably tell you that the sap to syrup ratio is 40:1, meaning it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. That is 39 gallons of water to boil away to the sky gods for a gallon of magic syrup. Imagine boiling a half-gallon of water to make macaroni and cheese on your stove top. Now multiply that times a million. That’s how maple syrup is made. Those of us who sucked it up and invested in the RO machines, we ain't looking back.

That steam and smoke is a beautiful thing floating above the foothills of the White Mountains. I love driving around and seeing all the buckets and smoke stacks in folks’ driveways. Those big old maples on the roadsides are sugar maples, but the real work is in the woods with the reds and silvers. In my woods, the ratio is closer to 65:1. This means my sap is 1.5% sugar. Maple syrup is officially 66% sugar – and I push mine to 68%. My syrup is, yes, a little sweeter.

Making maple syrup is a big deal for me, personally. It’s a powerful feeling, drawing sugar from the trees. I think in discovering it, I’ve re-discovered something in my blood. I have Ojibwe/Anishinaabe cousins and I’ve read about how their ancestors literally made maple sugar with birch bark and hot rocks. Eventually European traders showed up with metal, offering improvements to their techniques. Reading about how Jefferson and Madison were obsessed with maple sugar as an option to replace British cane sugar is intense. They took it seriously – the two even toured New England to learn about the crop. Growing up in the Boston area, I’ve been fascinated by the history of the Tea Party – and the fact that the radicals and true catalysts of the American Revolution were specifically from the Northeast. Lock a city down, King George III, and see what happens. Making sugar from trees isn’t just fun – it’s freedom. Knowing I get to partake in something that people took as a key component of local food resilience in the early days of our country (and before!) is empowering.

And it’s just….so easy up here. Jefferson planted maple trees on his little mountain in Virginia and never succeeded in making maple sugar. Meanwhile, I can’t keep up with the sap. I pull into my driveway after work and see an overflowing bucket and sigh. I leave work to work. But I remember the wooden hand-carved maple spile I have in my possession – a family heirloom passed to me from my great-aunt Betty, from some distant grandfather Alexander Masta(w) of the Michigan panhandle. My great-grandfathers sailed for Montreal in the 17th century and migrated west toward Ontario – they married into the Ojibwe tribes, and one day found themselves in America, via Michigan. My grandfather stumbled near Boston and met himself an Irish girl named Sally Shirley. Their marriage didn’t work out, but my parents bought a house down the street and I grew up eating corned beef and cabbage with my big, loud, loving Irish family. Get to work, Rich. Maple sap does, indeed, run in your blood. And so do the Good Folk.

But these pesky things we call jobs…. The wet heavy snow and ice of March and April storms brings lots of outages (and overtime for me, at my power company job) – a contradictory life-choice to my favorite hobby of making maple sugar. (But my great-something-grandfather Alexander helped build the locks on the Great Lakes. What have I ever really accomplished?) Every year I kick over at least one bucket of sour sap after a crazy week of overnight shifts in Tilton, Chocorua, or Lancaster. I tap 140 silver and red maples and make around 10-12 gallons of syrup on an old evaporator I got for $100. I filter it and bottle it in pretty glass. It’s my art. The sap is my paint. The bottle is my canvas. I hold the bottled syrup up to the light to admire the gem I’ve mined, the masterpiece I've painted.

Then I take a shot from my Funspot shot glass, filled with the last bit of syrup I didn’t bottle. Firey smokey nutrient-rich magic. A-woo! I howl. I can feel the March winds smash my old farmhouse. I'm still wearing my headlamp. I laugh about that. I might make $1000 in sales of maple products by Christmas. If you didn’t know, the maple syrup game isn’t cheap to get into. The few dollars we make matter. Evaporators and ROs and bottlers and filters and bottles and labels and refractometers and tubing and spiles and spouts and ins and outs and whimpers and shouts. Numbers, numbers, numbers! Who cares? I do, and I don’t. Maple making is part math, and part magic. It's prose and poetry. Late nights and early mornings and loving life and hating being alive. But pour me a shot of the good stuff, I'm in.

One of the sizes I sell is the 50ml “baby leaf.” This is a maple leaf-shaped bottle with a golden cap. It’s a smaller size, popular for gifts and sampling. Once someone bought a dozen bottles for his tenants at a business he owned in New Mexico. It’s been a gift for AirBnB guests less than a mile away. It fits in stockings. My brother worked for a chef in Oakland who appeared on Top Chef and he gifted him a bottle. It’s an aesthetic product and good money for a small farm. The syrup needs to be extra fancy, as amber as it gets, and clear. Around 5% of the bottles I fill end up crystallizing, which is just a thing that happens – especially when you’re pushing your luck with a higher sugar content of 68%. Basically, the bottom of the leaf bottle is filled with sugar crystals. I sit on these bottles all summer and debate my options. Discount? Dump out and bottle up? Chug? But I know the product is fine. And money isn’t worth its weight in paper – or emotions. I hear a 3-year-old I know is having a pancake-themed birthday party and I know what to do.

And so Sol and his brothers, sister, and cousins each get a bottle of magic mystery wizard maple syrup for party favors. Not only do they get to pour their own kiddo-sized bottles onto their birthday pancakes, but they get to admire the crystals in the bottles after. For days after the shindig, the brothers admire the sugar crystals – and yours truly, the farmer, the Land Wizard, cozies up in his little nest dreaming about the future of this farm. We need these simple little moments to get through life, don’t we? We need vision and purpose and some magic mystery wizard crystals to make us love whatever it is we do.

Suddenly there’s a new farm stand being built. The evaporator is cleaned up and the creaky smokestack in those violent March winds is guyed to the barn with a wire and pipe clips. The new flock of chickens is happy and eggs pile up. A few rEGGulars I have good connections with grab these early dozens. Hopefully by summer there will be eggs in the stand again. I cut down an unwanted juvenile maple tree and miss my cross-cut by a half inch and the tree falls backwards onto the barn – no damage to the barn but the exact spot where my lovely guy wire secures the smokestack is smashed by a branch. I climb onto the roof of the barn with the chainsaw and some laughs and I admire the view of Whiteface while making firewood, woodchip fodder, and future garden trellises. Nothing but magic up here. I feel like I’m climbing Everest. I chop up that firewood in the dusk and go to sleep tired and happy for the first time in months.

Spring sneaks upon us. March reminds us it’s still winter, but half the chickens escape their run and dust-bath in the sunny open-faced barn, enjoying the exposed grass and other nibbles. I want complacency but Something Wild critters want cracks and crevices – they demand that little taste of freedom. And I demand it, too. But there is a balance to be found.

And so I remind the Rhode Island Red I chase around frantically that the black bear is waking up soon, and if she lets me catch her, he won’t. She doesn’t care. She skidaddles and hops and shrieks and flaps. I channel my inner herding dog and make wide turns to funnel her back to the run before catching her in a corner of fencing. The black bears are coming. They will be hungry. A muddy bear paw print on the coop door I refuse to wash off reminds me every day. I’ll be the black bear before he can.

Maple sugaring is just one part of March for the New England homesteader. The birds need attention. The constant freeze-thaw of their run makes for a messy plot. They’re starving, as well. The feed isn’t cutting it! The girls want greens! Goober the guinea hen sounds like a car honking politely as it drives by. She refuses to leave the coop. Sam the Rooster King calls out every morning noble and proud. The hens cackle and bicker. I toss the birds old apples brought home by the linemen who went to the Cape for storm duty. Bounced around in bucket trucks while they spliced in services. Now they bounce around in old hay and woodchips, slowly turning into eggs.

The spring’s seeds need starting. I start four trays of microgreens while boiling sap. Onions are next. And so soon, lettuce. The garden beds melt off and beg for compost and weeding. The raspberries and elderberries need pruning. Apple scions and pawpaw seeds stare at me every time I grab shredded cheese from the fridge. I hear the ewes are lambing. I want to bring some lambs onto the land again this year, hopefully in May. My farmer friend who is about to make a quick grand off me keeps me updated on my future leg roasts. I note trees I want to fell – next year’s firewood. I think about ticks while I sit shirtless in the March sun. The dogs wrestle in the exposed pastures. The recent clock changes have made for more sunlight – suddenly, I’m in summer mode. I’m wild. The Anishinaabe in me, the Black Bear, the Land Wizard, the Irish wild boy who flirts with the good folk….I feel it all in the springy sun – doot, doot, doot – lookin’ out my back door.

Farmer-carrying sap through the snowy wood is the best workout. Me and the dogs love the work. I’ll fire up the evaporator for the first time – out in the sun, before the weekend snowfall. I’ll look out to Whiteface and daydream about felling that stubborn ten-thousand-foot high white pine blocking the view, while inhaling the soft steam of sugar and smoke. I do love smelling like maple and pine after nine hours of boiling. If I could capture it into a cologne and sell it, I would. But it's better when it's the real deal. I’ll read a few books by headlamp. I’ll boil a few hot dogs by sap. I’ll start a few seeds before the full moon. A few chickens will escape, ready to explore a bit of freedom. I’ll be ready to catch them – and embrace them. Then toss them back. Try again, hen. We're all trying, too.

[Hey! Thanks for reading! Did you know NH Maple Weekend is March 21 & 22? If you want to see a live homestead in action, you're welcome to swing by this weekend and check out Something Wild Farm's annual Sugar Camp. We boil outdoors with a wood-fired evaporator and let the wind get a lick at the syrup before bottling. If you're lucky, Rich will be well-caffeinated and full of eggs 'n bacon and he'll talk your ear off. If the smoke's a-stackin', Rich will be yakkin'! There might be hot dogs....

There definitely will be fresh maple syrup for sale, possibly some soy-free eggs, and a few other goodies as well at the brand new farm stand. Find the chicken mailbox on North Sandwich Road and you've found Something Wild Farm!]