Backyard Sugarin’

March 25, 2018

Screen shot 2018-03-25 at 8.14.30 PMMy darling spouse gave me a book a couple of years ago called “Backyard Sugarin’.”
The book’s central advice is right there in the title: do your “sugarin” in the back yard, or preferably further away. The author says as much; the key to marital bliss is to keep maple syrup production out of the house.
Generally I have tried to follow this commandment. Last Saturday night, in the sugar bush at our farm near Madoc, about halfway between Toronto and Montreal, I built a roaring flame under a pan full of maple sap and left it overnight.

The fire went out and in the morning I had about an inch of golden sap concentrate in the bottom of my pan, and no time to boil it more before coming home. I ended up carting a 5-gallon plastic pail, about 2/3 full with sap concentrate, back to Toronto.
A week later on Saturday I went through more than two bags of charcoal boiling the stuff further on my barbecue in the back yard. The family then went to the movie theatre to see The Black Panter. When we got home the sap was still more concentrated, but not quite syrup.  I begged for special permission to finish the boil on the kitchen stove.

Don’t worry. This doesn’t end badly. In fact, it ended, at about 11 p.m., with about four litres of golden maple syrup. (There is always a lot less syrup than you hope there will be). I thought about the effort of all the people: my wife, my neighbours, my sister, my mom, and some friends, who had all come out to our farm last weekend and helped us with the gathering and the boiling.
I thought of my brother-in-law, who helped by melting some of the ice in the sap barrel. His technique: drain sap out of the barrel into some sap buckets, heat them on the fire that’s crackling under the syrup pan, and then pour the hot sap back into the barrel to melt the rest of the sap. He also passed me some chunks of ice from the barrel so I could put them into the evaporator to melt. It just has not been a warm March around here.
Our syrup is filled with the joy of those who helped to boil it down.
This morning, when I finished filling all of the bottles with syrup, I was hoping for some sort of a nod, like, “Hey, well done;” instead what I got was my sweetheart, in grim silence, scrubbing down surfaces from which I had not quite removed all of the stickiness, apparently.
It’s back to the backyard for me.