Maple Syrup Creemees!

Boiling the Sap.

Nectar of the Gods and Vermonters

The sap is running these days up in our neck of the woods and the syrup is boiling in hundreds of sugar shacks big and small. It's "Sugarin' Season" and a sweet season it is indeed after the Winter we've just been through. Sure, there's still 2 feet of snow pack on the ground over most of our yard, but it was over 50 today and the sun was out, so we decided to head to Bragg Family Farm for the first maple creemee of the season. The local "delicacy" up here this time of year is syrup on snow, but quite frankly I am sick of snow, with or without maple syrup. An ice cream cone on the other hand sounded just right. How right it was is hard to explain but just let me say that my creemee was extraordinarily delicious. They weren't boiling sap at Bragg farm today. They still use buckets to collect sap and were out getting another load collected from their 50 acre "sugarbush". (Why a sugar maple forest is called a sugarbush is unknown to me.) Our neighbor down the road was boiling however, and you can just see the steam escaping from the top of his shack in the photo above. He uses plastic piping to collect his sap which is the most common system these days. With the plastic piping you don't have to trudge through the woods with a collecting tank on a wagon emptying buckets. Gravity brings the sap right to your sugar house.