Warming days and freezing nights bring the best conditions for maple sap to flow. These days most producers use long, colorful lengths of tubing running from tree to tree, the sap gathered in large stainless steel tanks and transported to elaborate evaporators in well lighted sugar houses.
Grandfather Golly Fish wrote often over the years of his love for maple syrup, looking forward each srping especially to a jug of the pale, first run maple nectar.
Here's a memory he shared in his Golly column in 1968.
Sugaring time is almost here again and comes to mind a boyhood experience in sugar making. The time was about 1884 or 1885. The pal in the project was a lad about Golly's age by the name of Floyd Kelly but known as Dick. We remained friends all the years until his demise.
Sap spiles could be purchased at two cents apiece but we had to make ours. We whittled plugs four or five inches long from pieces of pine that fitted into holes bored into maple trees. The other end was spout shaped and a gimlet made a hole to let the sap run from the trees.
For sap buckets we each borrowed and we found a few tomato cans to hold sap.
When the sap flowed we gathered it from four or five trees and put it in the big kettle we had scrubbed and scoured. A fire was built and we were in business. A trouble was to find dry wood but some sogs of old rotted logs were dampeners and it was a long time before the sap started to boil.
We were a persistent pair of boys and in time we had a small amount of syrup but it was a dark mess and gritty to the taste. If memory serves correctly we "syruped off" only once and then went out of the business, but –
It was real fun for a couple of kids.
I shared another of Golly's maple sugaring memories here several years ago.
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