Maple sap is so sweet

If you’re driving down a road in the Northwest Corner at this time of year, you might wonder why so many trees are tied together with blue or white plastic tubing. Is it some kind of surveying tool? An effort to demarcate whose trees belong to whom?

Actually, those unattractive and workmanlike tubes are part of one of the most beautiful (and delicious) traditions of northwest Connecticut and New England. They are collecting maple sap, which will later be boiled down into maple syrup.

Maple sugaring is a dying art. It is phenomenally time consuming and labor intensive to coax a little bit of thick brown syrup out of a maple tree. Back in the old days, farmers and woodsmen would strap on their snowshoes in late February and early March and trek out into the woods, where they would “tap� the trunks of their healthiest maple trees.

Maple trees produce a sugary, clear sap that looks like water. When the weather conditions are just right, the trees force that sap up through their trunks and out the tap. For this to happen, the days have to be warmish and sunny while the nights have to be cold but not too cold. The mix of warm and cold combines to create a pressure on the trees that releases the sugary sap.

In those olden times, a  metal bucket was attached to the tree, just beneath the tap (which is called a spile). A metal “hatâ€� was installed on top of spile and bucket to keep out debris.

Sugarmakers would go into the woods every day to collect heavy buckets of sticky clear liquid, which they would transport back to their sugar shacks.

That’s exhausting work, needless to say.

Which is why many sugarmakers now use plastic tubing to run the sap from the spile to a central collection point, usually a large plastic tub. Of course, many sugarmakers still use the metal buckets, or a combination of buckets and tubing. Instead of snowshoeing out to collect the sap, they usually roll through the woods in a pickup truck or ATV.

Once the sap has been brought back to the sugar shack, it’s strained and then put into a special tank, called an evaporator, that is full of mysterious pipes and partitions designed to separate the fresh, light sap from the heavier sap that is about to turn into syrup.

Making syrup is not only time consuming; it’s also expensive. Sugarmakers must collect and boil 40 gallons of sap to get 1 gallon of syrup. To boil all that sap into syrup requires a tremendous amount of wood — not to mention the manpower (or womanpower) needed to keep splitting logs and chucking them into the hungry fire beneath the evaporator tray, often all day, for several days at a time. Once the sap starts running, it has to be collected before it disappears and boiled before bacteria begins to attack it.

That’s one of the things that makes maple syrup so rare and precious: Man doesn’t decide when it’s going to be made. Nature does.

For all those reasons, sugarmaking is a dying art, even here in forested New England. Many of the local sugarhouses have closed down in just the past five years. Camp Sloane YMCA in Salisbury no longer runs its sugar shack. Neither does the Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk. The Jacquiers in North Canaan stopped making syrup about two years ago.

Happily, several sugarmakers continue to press on. The Audubon Center in Sharon not only makes and sells syrup, it also offers tours in mid-March.

This year’s MapleFest tours are March 20 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The fee is $5 for adults and $3 for children 12 and under. The sweetly fragrant tours last about 45 minutes.

“The season seems to have started later this year than normal,� said Audubon Director Scott Heth. “The weather was still cold in late February. Operators in places like Bridgewater start earlier. To me it seems like over the past few years the season started earlier and ended earlier. We started collecting sap in late February, and boiled our first batch the first weekend in March.�

A few Northwest Corner farmers are still investing their time and energy in making syrup.

Gordon Ridgway, a farmer in Cornwall and the town’s first selectman, continues to make syrup. Winter Mead of Norfolk is not a farmer but remains one of the Northwest Corner’s most stalwart and productive sugarmakers. Phil Hart has been making syrup for decades on his property in Cornwall. He said he anticipates this is going to be an excellent year, with a “slow, late spring.�

Although many sugarmakers only produce enough for themselves and a small client base, the Mead and Ridgway syrup can be purchased at LaBonne’s Market in Salisbury. And of course, syrup will be available at the gift shop at Audubon Sharon on Route 4.