WATER AND SUGAR

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. 

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.

A load of sap, plus Ben, riding to the sugarhouse.
(Re the snow:  photo taken two weeks after the first boil.)

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.

Left to right, Carly, Audrey, Ben (nearly obscured next to Hans),  Hans and Olin inspect the flood

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.)

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.

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.

Olin on the TAM (Trail Around Middlebury).  About the right amount of snow for March.

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