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| Fruitless last-minute efforts to save houses on Plum Island, Massachusetts. |
Water
On the morning of March 7, the first of several dangerous high tides clawed
at the sand tubes (“coirs”) and concrete blocks homeowners had placed to shore
up the foundations of their homes on Plum Island. I happened to be in Newburyport the week of the storm and we
checked out the beach at the first dangerously high tide. (Plum Island serves as Newburyport’s
barrier beach.) The distance
between houses and ocean had already been drastically shortened by earlier
storms. It was clear that some wouldn't make it through this storm. Two high tides later,
several of the houses were upended by the waves, others in danger of the same
fate.
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| Photo from the New York Times shows how the beach looked two days later. |
Sugar
The days
grew warm and the nights remained cold later that week back in Vermont. Perfect conditions for the maple sap to
start running. The Hustons and
Goudeys (Newburyport had come to Vermont) rounded up the sap barrels and spent
most of the weekend overseeing a boil.
 |
| Hans checks out the line-up of sap-filled bins. |
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| A load of sap, plus Ben, riding to the sugarhouse. (Re the snow: photo taken two weeks after the first boil.) |
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| Audrey using the hot sap to boil an egg. (Why not?) |
 |
| The first boil is on! |
While the sap was boiling away, and just to keep busy (waiting for the sap to evaporate is a long boring process!), Cliff and Chris built us a bridge over the narrow end of the pond.
Water
The second day of the boil it rained on the snowless ground all day and all night. The directions that water seeps through the meadow were clearer than ever. Three different seeps feed the pond. We watched the pond rise, and the new bridge nearly floated. All in just a few hours.
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| Left to right, Carly, Audrey, Ben (nearly obscured next to Hans), Hans and Olin inspect the flood |
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| Peak flood. (The bridge awaits a railing.) |
The big drainpipe
at the other end of the pond lowered the water level fairly quickly as the rain
slackened. There was now a roaring
brook on the other side. Ice had probably
helped impede the flow.
Sugar
Last year’s weather didn’t allow the trees to
produce as much sap. It was a poor
sugaring year for everyone, including commercial producers. Plus we knew less about making syrup. This year our prime brewers (sugarers?)
made sure that the syrup was at the proper temperature when it was
finished. The higher the sugar
concentration in a sugar solution, the higher the temperature at which the sap
boils. As you evaporate water from
the sap the temperature of the boiling liquid increases. Finished syrup boils at 7 degrees
Fahrenheit above the boiling temperature of water (212 degrees). Hence, 219 degrees is optimum for finished syrup. Boiling
it longer will result in syrup that is too dark or too thick. (Somehow we’ve never had a problem with
“too thick.”) We filtered the
finished syrup, a tedious process, through several layers of cheesecloth to get
a clearer product. (When sap is boiled, the minerals that are naturally present
in the sap are concentrated or hardened into a grainy substance called niter, otherwise
known as sugar sand.)
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| Our set-up for filtering out the sugar sand. |
After the
first weekend boil we ended up with over 45 jars of the sweetest maple syrup
I’ve ever had. The first day’s syrup was light but tasty. The second was darker and more
robust. And there is more to come.
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| The jars of syrup begin to accumulate. The earliest syrup is on the right. |
Water
After all the rain there was a dusting of snow. About the right amount for a day in
March. Time for pruning, I
thought. But all I had a chance to
trim were the apple trees. Then
winter returned with a new fall of snow–enough to cross-country ski on our own
land and create the best downhill ski conditions of the season. Cold enough, too, to have the snow last
longer than you might expect for late March. And snowy
enough to postpone the rest of the pruning.
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| Olin on the TAM (Trail Around Middlebury). About the right amount of snow for March. |
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| Snow again, a week later. Following the trail to the Mitchell's land. |
***
Still, it is officially spring.
Some of the things that are probably happening now, even if it's not obvious:
·
Pussy willows are beginning
to open.
·
Great horned owls are
nesting in old retailed hawk nests.
·
Skunk cabbage is flowering
in swamps.
·
Brown creepers are among the
earliest spring migrants, perhaps because they don’t migrate far.
·
Male woodcocks return as
soon as the ground has thawed enough to make earthworms accessible.
·
When the snow melts, tunnels
in the lawn are revealed. The tunnels were made by moles.*
And...on a warmish
day a week ago, before the fresh snow came, the red-winged blackbirds
arrived in large numbers. Even with snow still on
the ground we hear them chirping––in truth, more of a “conk-a-
reeeee” sound, not especially
tuneful, but one we will hear every day from now through summer. They will build nests in the meadow.
 |
| Spring? |
* Items
in this list are from The Place You Call
Home, “A Look at the Season’s Main Events: Spring,” Center for Northern
Woodlands Education, a publication of Vermont Fish and Wildlife, 2008
