Blog
Changes
Ken Hall
We’ve made some exciting changes at Bobo’s Mountain Sugar this year but they are nothing compared to the changes taking place in the world as a result of COVID-19. The new bottling unit and solar panels on the sugar house are not nearly as important as wishing for the health and safety of our friends and customers.
One thing that has not changed is the spring run of sap as the maple trees emerge from winter dormancy. Making syrup from that sap almost feels normal in a time of uncertainty, though we’re missing the social aspects of sugaring with everyone hunkered down at home.
But maple syrup is more than images of muddy roads and folks gathering around the steam on sunny, late-winter afternoons. It is also more than a luxury to float pancakes in. As a sweetener, pure maple syrup has been an important staple in food supplies for centuries. There are literally hundreds of delicious ways to use maple syrup in recipes and a little bit can go a long way (unless you’re trying to float pancakes).
Maple syrup stores well, refrigerated or in the freezer once opened. With its high sugar content, it won’t freeze. With a little effort, it ships well, too. As long as the Post Office remains open and the UPS truck keeps slogging up the road, we are able and happy to keep you supplied. The sap is running and we’re not going anywhere.
At this time, food products are generally considered safe by the CDC and FDA. Bobo’s maple syrup is drawn into stainless steel barrels at around 200 degrees F (93C) and is heated again to over 180F (82C) when packaged into glass. As always, everyone should wash their hands after handling boxes that have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles.
Be safe. Be kind. Be well.
Sugaring 2019
Tina Hartell
Sugaring 2019 Updates
April 16, 2019
Our final boil was last night, and the sap just gave up. We made nearly 1/3 of the syrup last night from the same amount of sap as the night before with what appeared to be the same sugar content. We spent much too long and burned much too much wood to make it worth it. But overall, the season was great! Despite the late start, it never really warmed up giving us solid sap runs through the whole season. Plus the sugar content it our sap stayed at 2.2% for most of the season which made a huge difference in how much syrup we made. We ended the season just shy of 900 gallons in total, boiling 21 times over the course of 32 days. A huge difference from last year where we boiled the same amount over twice the number of days (and made less syrup).
April 5, 2019
The trees are giving it up! Even on chilly, blustery days if the sun is shining, the sap is roaring down the mountain. We’ve been making a lot of syrup and the end is not in sight quite yet. This past week the nights have been cold - in the upper teens and low to mid twenties. That is changing as the nighttime temps are beginning to hover around freezing. We’ll see how far we can get.
March 26, 2019
The trees have opened up, and sap has finally started to flow. Yesterday was cold, just around 35F but with the strong sun, we collected about 1200 gallons of sap (or about 2/3 of our raw-sap collection tank). The sap is really sweet this year. We normally have a low sugar percentage -about 1.8% - but this year we’ve been consistently around 2.2%. This makes a big difference in the amount of syrup we make. At 1.8% sugar, we need 44 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. At 2.2% we only need 36 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. We can make 10 more gallons of syrup per full tank of raw sap. We also had a stunning 3% sugar in the open-grown maples from which we’ve hung some buckets. Our friends who sugar a couple towns over also have high-sugar content in their sap. The vacuum has helped us a lot during this late start to the season. Buckets are not filling quickly despite some warm days.
We’ve boiled five times and are just about at 25% of our crop. Starting tomorrow it looks like we’re going to get buried in sap! Hopefully we can get through a very-warm weekend and into a cooler next week.
March 18, 2019
By all accounts it’s been a late start to the sugaring season here in our corner of Vermont. The sap began to trickle in on March 12 but really didn’t start in earnest until March 14. Our sap tanks filled on both March 15 and 16, and we boiled both days. Now things have frozen up and it looks like we may not boil again until Wednesday or Thursday. This time last year we had already boiled 7-8 times and were digging out sap lines from under 5’ of March snow!
Be Whole Again
Tina Hartell
I’ve spent a good part of the last few months running and hiking in the woods trying to wear out this guy.
But, as everyone knows, that runs counter to a well-established law of physics which states that No Amount of Distance Travelled Will Exhaust a Ten-Month Old Labrador. So pretty much it’s just tired me out (which isn’t bad) and also allowed me to explore new trails and woods that are near home.
The other day I was running on a trail I had never been on in the summer - having only skied it years before. And it was on the way down that I saw this, just to the right of the trail.
A cellar hole.
It took my breath away - as they always do.
Evidence of an old house, an old farm that used to stand right here. The foundation is all that is left. And I can’t help but think of all the hours worked, and the births, deaths, music, tears, and life that occurred here years ago. And what happened to them? Did they want to leave or did they have to?
The ghosts are there. I felt as though I was intruding, as a spent 15 minutes looking around at the old barn foundation, the well, the plowed forest floor, and the stone walls.
I’ve also been reading a lot of poetry recently because in dark times, it is the artists who show us the light. Robert Frost, one of the lion voices of rural northern New England and often a comfort to me, says this in his poem, “Directive.”
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry -
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
Seeds in Flight
Tina Hartell
There are a lot of seeds around right now. I’m shelling dry beans from the garden, the kids come running in with “stick tights” stuck tight over their shirts and shoes, turkeys are running around eating up the acorns, and milkweed seeds are blowing from alongside the pond. Seeds do get around. They’re supposed to, that’s their job - to get as far away from the parent plant as they can and set up shop to grow and reproduce. Seed dispersal is a plant’s one big shot at horizontal movement.
These maple samaras (a.k.a. helicopter seeds) are in abundance now. They are the twins of the seed world, clustered together on the ends of branches, waiting for the right time to take flight. Once airborne they twirl either clockwise or counterclockwise with precision, as the angled “wing” weighted on the top side and papery on the bottom side give a lesson in perfect physics.
These ash seeds are also samaras, but in a different style. They have a single straight wing and the seed is much smaller and less heavy. The seeds all hope to land in a spot just right for germination. Most don’t. And then even those seeds that do germinate never make it to maturity. But trees play the long game - sending thousands of seeds out year after year at great energy expenditure with pretty incredible success.
Plowing the Woods
Tina Hartell
The Vermont woods are littered with evidence of past human disturbance. Many of the stone walls that criss-cross the woods and lines our roads were made in the late 1700s/early 1800s as European settlers deforested and plowed the land for crops. Every time their plow came across a rock in the ground they would stop, pick it up, and carry it to the side of their field - an arduous task as the glaciers dumped horrible amounts of rock during their retreat 10,000 years ago. Stone walls are often nothing more than stone dumps. While some of them do delineate old (and current) property lines, many of them just separate different fields.
In this photo, the forest floor on the left side of the wall comes up higher - almost to the top of the wall - whereas the right side drops down. This is called a plow terrace, and is further evidence of plowing, as repeated turns of the plow caused soil to be pushed down hill until it hung up against the stones.
A plow terrace on the left of the stone wall
On either side of the wall, you can also see that plowing over 150 years ago has smoothed out the natural irregularities of the forest floor making the ground fairly smooth and even, a trait that doesn’t exist on unplowed land.
Much of this cultivated land was turned over to pasture land when sheep were introduced to Vermont in the mid-1800s, and then much of it returned to forest between 1900-1950. Vermont has young forests - but aggressive as hell as it is a fight to keep land open. Trees are an unstoppable force.