In 1955 I married into a family of dairy farmers who happened to own a sugar bush. A sugar bush is not just a bush it is a name for a stand of maple trees that were harvested for their sap each spring in northern New York and this sugar bush contained 2800 maple trees so this was a big operation that netted a lot of money and a lot of barrels of maple syrup that was all sent to nearby Vermont at the end of the sugar season.
The sugar season started in late winter and ended in early spring during the days when the temperatures in the day time warmed up enough to make the sap run and the temperatures froze each night to stop it and that lasted from 3 to 7 weeks depending on the weather. The sap was gathered from early to mid morning when the sap ran faster.
Any tree over 10 inches in diameter was "tapped" at two to four feet above ground with a hollow metal spout hammered into the tree. Each spout had a hook on it unto which we hung a metal bucket. Each bucket had a small metal "tent" that covered it to keep any sort of debris from falling into it. During the early mornings the sap slowly dripped into the buckets, was collected by noon, and hung back up to collect the next day's supply of sap.
Each evening and night of frost stopped the sap until the next morning's thaw. Once the buckets were filled they were gathered up by our hired hands that drove a big horse drawn sleigh through the sugar bush that held a large metal vat. The buckets were emptied into the vat and returned to hang on the trees. The sled was then driven to the sugar shack that was a large bunkhouse type of place the men lived in during sugar season and in the middle was another large vat that had a long fire bed under it that was constantly fed a fire from start of sugar seasoning until the end. The men lived here all that time.
The sled driven vat was emptied via a long hose into the vat that sat above the fires. This vat has metal divisions in it and the inside men kept moving the sap around these divisions with boat oars that were used just for syrup making. This sap looked like clear water and was "boiled" down over a time period until it looked like maple syrup. Depending on the sugar concentration of the sap tells us what we can expect in syrup. Sap usually averages approximately 2 percent sugar and at this concentration it takes 43 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. Should the sap sugar concentration be higher then less sap was required to produce a gallon of syrup. We were always able to produce a grade which we called "fancy" but was really graded as Grade A light Amber or as our next door neighbors in Canada called No. 1, Light Extra.
During this time some interesting activities would happen at the sugar shack. When the men's food was brought up by sleigh each day often a few packages of hot dogs were included and the men would float them in the boiling sap to cook them as a treat. When the sap was boiled down, one of the men would bring in a big tub of snow and a ladle of syrup was slowly poured onto the mound of snow creating a chewy, leathery desert that was called "sugar on snow" or "leather aprons" or "leather britches" depending on what part of the northeast you were sugaring in or came from. Because the hot syrup cooled so rapidly it did not have time to crystallize.
When the season was over the 50 gallon were shipped over to Vermont to be sold to a company that always bought our syrup. However, we had pint, quart and gallon cans that were filled for ourselves, family and friends. We kept these in our freezer because we could take a container out, let it sit a bit, pour off what we needed and then put it back in the freezer where it would be fine until we needed it again. Another treat we made during the sugar season as the syrup was brought down to the main house was maple sugar candy which was made in the rubber molds we had in the shape of maple leaves.
I can remember one season, Hazel, my mother-in-law, was in the middle of making maple sugar candy and had filled all her rubber molds. She had to wait until her molds hardened so she decided to make some donuts which she always did in a big cast iron kettle. When she was finished making her donuts she put the cast iron kettle of hot oil out onto a table on the big glassed in porch. My brother-in-law, Milam, happened to stop by because he knew Hazel was going to be making maple sugar candy that day. As he walked in and came into the closed in porch he spotted the big cast iron kettle sitting on the table and thinking it was cooled down syrup he drove his finger in to get a good amount to lick on only to find out he had stuck his finger into really hot donut cooking oil. It certainly was a lesson learned by Milam and it was a story told many times over the years, especially at sugar seasons.
Once the sugar season was over and before it became time to do the outside spring chores, the lull in time was filled with the men clearing any dead wood from the sugar bush, cutting it into logs and stacking it outside the sugar shack for next year's sugaring time.
Life went on during those years as the boys became men and left the dairy farming business for other things that interested them more. One by one the five dairies were sold off and eventually the sugar bush was also. Sugaring never stopped in our part of the world. Each sugaring season sugar bush owners would look forward to taking time out of their farming lives to see how much extra cash they could bring in with this profit making venture.
Farms that had a sugar bush, whether it is large or small, were farms that sold at a premium in Saint Lawrence County or in the nearby counties.
Then about 1976 a friend of mine bought a nearby farm and discovered she had about 300 good maple trees and did not know how to sugar. I did and she asked me to help her. Twenty years later things had changed. We still tapped the trees, but instead of buckets hanging on them we had clear plastic tubes attached and running through the woods into a large vat. This vat was a collection point near Sue's sugar shack where she had her firing vat set up to cook the sap. Since Sue did not have a bunch of hired hands as we did from the five dairies, I rounded up four of our friends with their kids and we had a good old fashioned "Sugaring Bee" one weekend. We did all the things that I mentioned above including "sugar on snow", cooking hot dogs, and getting the pint, quart and gallon containers which were filled with the syrup after it was boiled down. All the "workers" were given a fair amount of syrup to take home with recipes for making maple sugar candy and other things.
It was a wonderful time bringing back memories of 20 years before that and it was a learning time for the kids who had never had that experience, plus a time of friendship and fellowship for the adults, especially for those who had never sugared before.