Maple Syrup at Adamah

For a few weeks a year, the maple trees along Beebe Hill Road are adorned with metal buckets from which a distinctive plink, plink sound emanates.

Sunny, forty degree days and freezing nights wake up the vascular system of the trees around us (all of them, not just the maples) and nutrients begin to flow from roots to buds in preparation for the explosive growth of spring. Each year during this perfect window for intercepting a little of that sweet sap, we drill shallow holes into the trunks about three feet up, place a spile in each, hang a bucket to catch the flow, and watch them fill with sweet liquid. 

Maple sap is sweeter than that of other trees in our area, but the taste is still very faint with you sip it. To turn it into syrup that can be drizzled on pancakes, we have to boil off the water. 

After schlepping the sap from Beebe to Isabella Freedman's campus sugar shack, we pour it into an evaporator pan with a raging fire underneath. If you drive by Johnson Road in late winter and notice a cloud of steam that smells like IHOP, you're passing by the evaporator. Slowly, slowly, the liquid thickens until we've reduced it down forty times. 

Potowatami Botonist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls our northeastern region Maple Nation- a distinction beyond state or country that celebrates the delicious, storable food source that generations have delighted in. She says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, 

"It is said that our people learned to make sugar from the squirrels. In late winter, the hungry time, when caches of nuts are depleted, swuirrels take to the treetops and gnaw on the brances of sugar maples. Scraping the bark allows sap to exude from the twig, and the squirrels drink it. But the real goods come the next morning, when they follow the same circuit they made the day before, licking up the sugar crystals that formed on the bark overnight."