February 10, 2023
We tapped our sugar maples this week, and that to me is the beginning of spring. The sap will run as long as the temperatures are below freezing at night and well above freezing during the day. The “sugaring” season usually lasts about 6 weeks, or until the trees start to bud.
Maple Syrup was a dietary staple for the Native Americans that lived in New England. When little else was available in early spring, they relied heavily on maple syrup for sustenance. It takes at least 40 gallons of sap boiled down to make 1 gallon of syrup, and without the use of kettles they collected the sap in hollowed out logs and boiled it down by dropping hot rocks into it. (Okay, I quit).
Later, the colonists used copper kettles over an open flame which made the process infinitely easier. (It’s all relative right?) They boiled the sap beyond the syrup stage and turned it into sugar, which without refrigeration was much easier to preserve. An average family would make 200 pounds of maple sugar and an exceptionally industrious family could make 1,000 pounds. Any excess was an easy commodity to trade or sell. (For comparison’s sake, if Anne and I converted the syrup we make each year into sugar, it would probably be about 50 pounds, slackers that we are).
In 1789 Benjamin Rush and a group of Philadelphia Quakers started a campaign to end slavery by convincing people to use maple sugar as a sweetener instead of cane sugar, which was grown in the West Indies with slave labor. Rush described maple sugar as the “morally superior” choice. His mission was to “lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian Sugar, and thus indirectly destroy slavery.”
Thomas Jefferson picked up the cause and attempted to start a “sugar orchard” at Monticello. Using the labor of enslaved people, he planted maple trees which he had purchased while touring New England. Jefferson’s interest in breaking the cane sugar trade was “to help relieve the misery of the West Indian slave trade” and to break Great Britain’s grip on the United States. Sugar was the number one import of that era, and it all came by way of England.
After the civil war, beet sugar became popular, the price of cane sugar dropped, and the demand for maple sugar collapsed. Maple syrup, instead of maple sugar, soon became the maple product of choice.
After multiple failed attempts, Jefferson was finally able to get some of his sugar maples to grow, but the trees never produced any “sweet water.” There is something about the freeze thaw cycle and temperature differential of our northern climate that creates the sugar, and the flow of sap. During the summer months the tree collects sunshine and turns it into a simple sugar which it stores over the winter as starch. In the spring the starch turns back into sugar. When the tree becomes pressurized, through a process which is not entirely understood, the sap begins to flow from high pressure to low, and the tap hole gives the sap an easy way out. Technically, it’s all a byproduct of photosynthesis, but really - that’s just a fancy name for something that is nothing short of pure magic.