Welcome to the Sugarbush

Brian stops to tap a maple tree on his way up the hill

As you may know, I recently started working at Bear Cobble Sugarworks, which operates a sugarbush (the more-than-apt term for a syrup-producing piece of forest) in Starksboro, Vermont. It's gorgeous up here, especially with snow plastered to all the trees from a recent storm, and the work has been wonderful so far. It's pretty difficult, I spend much of my time hiking through snow, brush, and trees, but I've always loved the feeling of satisfied exhaustion I have after a day of difficult, outdoor work. I'll be doing a few posts about the things I'm learning while I'm here so that you all can get a taste of what it's like to make maple syrup. For this post, I'll be talking about a typical day of tapping trees.

The owner of Bear Cobble is a client of my landscaping company, and the company forester, Brendan, runs the show all year round. He lives up the road and does forestry consulting throughout the area when he's not making improvements to the sugarbush's infrastructure. For this season, we have a regular crew of 5 - Brendan, Jennifer, Brian, Sarah, and me, with help from the owner and a weekend worker called Eric - to get some 30,000 taps in and to make sure the lines are airtight for the sake of the vacuum pumps by the end of February or so.

That means we're pretty busy! We figure we've done about 9,000 taps so far. With any luck, we'll finish the full run and check all the lines for leaks at least once by the time the weather consistently gets above freezing during the day, which could be anytime between the end of February and the end of March. When the nights are below freezing, and the days are sunny and above freezing, sap runs the best. We've actually had a bit of warm weather since I got here, which gave us a chance to run the pumps and flush old sap out of the lines, but I'm getting a bit off topic. I'll talk more about how sap works in another post.

On any given day, I get up around 6:30 and prepare for the day, which involves putting on long johns, track pants, snow pants, and 2 or 3 jackets. At 8:00, I make my commute downstairs - I'm living in an apartment above the vacuum pumps in the sugarhouse, which is a pretty large, modern building - and meet with the crew about what we're going to do that morning. Unless it's too cold out, we'll be tapping trees. So we'll take a look at the map to decide where to start working:

This map shows the older (meaning the trees have been tapped before) and larger of the two sections of the woods we're working in. The brown lines are called wet/dry lines or conductors: they're sets of large pipes that carry vacuum pressure up to the woods and carry all the sap from the woods to the sugarhouse. The yellow squares signify vacuum boosters, which divide each larger system into sections. The faint, gray lines are called main lines, and, they run from a conductor or from a booster up into the woods in rows about 100 feet apart. They can be anywhere from 500 to 1,500 feet long. All the blue lines on the map are main lines which we have completed by walking along them and tapping all the trees that feed into them. Coming off of each main line are lengths of tubing which lead to individual trees, with 1-5 trees feeding into each tube. Each tree feeds into the tube by way of a drop, which is just a length of the same tubing spliced into the main tube that fits onto the end of the spouts that we put into each tree. We mark this map every day with the lines we've completed and any problems we couldn't fix in the field, like a tree that has fallen on a main line and needs to be cut up to be moved.

The author and his technicolor snowsuit on a Polaris 4-wheeler with tread wheels

Once we know where we're going and what we're doing, we can fill our bright, orange vests with spouts, extra tubing, and other tools and parts we might need, pack up our drills, and start up the 4-wheelers. We drive up into the woods, which can take up to 15 or 20 minutes, and park near the main lines we're going to be working. Before we start hiking, we each have to strap a special drill and a mallet on. The drills have an attachment on the front that helps us drill straight into a tree perpendicular to it's grain, and also stops us from drilling too far, like a tiny drill press. They get slung over our shoulders. The mallets have plastic heads to drive in taps without breaking them, and they dangle from our wrists.

Green tubing comes and a main line

Once we're fully equipped, we begin to work up a main line in pairs, each person tapping the trees on one side of the line or the other. This is mostly for convenience, it means we usually don't have to duck under the main line to work trees on the other side. It's also good to have a partner in case you run out of taps, need help with a repair, or fall into an icy, glacial chasm, which are pretty rare in Vermont, but you never know. This is the meat-n-pataters part of the work. You hike uphill looking for green tubing coming off the main line, which you can kinda see in the picture at right. Then, you approach the first (or last) tree on that piece of tubing and start examining it. You're looking for defects - dead trees, rotten spots, burs and galls, scars where branches used to be, and old tap holes. Any damage done to a tree will cause the tree to grow a bunch of scar tissue around it, effectively cordoning it off from the rest of the organism. This scar tissue does not conduct sap, which helps prevent pathogens from spreading throughout the tree, but it also means we wouldn't get much or any sap if we tapped into it. The picture below shows a piece of maple wood cut from just inside the bark of a maple tree, with four tap holes in it. The dark area around each hole is scar tissue that formed after the holes were drilled. Notice how the scarred area is only barely wider than each hole, but is much, much longer. That's because the grain of the tree, which is a series of long, thin fibers, runs in the long direction, and it takes a lot more scar tissue to stop sap from moving parallel to the grain than perpendicular to it.

This wood is actually the seat of a bench outside the sugarhouse. The underside of the seat is the tree's bark.

So, you scan the tree looking for a spot free of defects and as far away as possible from old tap holes and such. Then, you pick up your drill, square it up against the tree, and drill as deeply as the attachment will allow you, smoothly and carefully so that the hole is as even and uniform as possible. Again, roughness and defects in the hole will cause extra scarring, affect the health of the tree over time, and may even inhibit sap flow this season. Then, you reach into your vest pocket and pull out a tap, which is basically a plastic tube with a nubbin on it for you to hit with your hammer. You line up the tap with the hole, and pound it in until it doesn't sound hollow anymore, which is how you know it went in deep enough. Finally, you attach the drop tubing to the tap, and you can move on to the next tree!

As you work up the line, you have to climb over rocks and fallen trees and through brush. Sometimes, it's steep enough that I've had to pull myself up by holding onto beech saplings. This past week, the weather has been pretty nice: in the teens and twenties and sunny. Sometimes, I have to contend with falling snow, which fogs up my glasses and makes it hard to see. Other times, it can be very cold, especially in the morning, which tends to wear on the spirit. The good part about hiking uphill is that it keeps you warm, but it can be very tiring. Coming down is noticeably colder, but much easier and faster.

You'll spend the whole morning doing this, with light conversation sprinkled here and there. Sometimes you'll have to repair a piece of tubing or tighten a tube. If the tubing gets loose and sags, sap can get trapped in the low section and cause a buildup of bacteria or prevent the vacuum from acting on a particular tree. That's another interesting thing: the vast majority of these tubes and pipes run downhill. we're using vacuum, but only to help gravity. Vacuum will not pull sap very much against gravity, especially spread across a huge system of pipes.

The sun starting to set on the sugarbush

Then, around noon, we get on the 4-wheelers and head to the sugarhouse for lunch. The afternoon is much the same. We work until it's too dark to do a good job. Before we finish up, we update the map, replace the drill batteries, check the drill bits' tightness, and set up what we can for the next day. By this point, I'm exhausted from hiking all day, and usually head up to my apartment for a shower, some dinner, and a little TV before I zonk out. I've been trying to write blog posts at night, but I've been too tired to motivate myself. Oh well, it means that I sleep like a rock.

Now you know about what we do, so in later posts I'll be able to talk about why we do it, and how this whole, huge operation results in silky sweet maple syrup. Until then, I remain

The Regular Farmer

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All photos were taken by Ryan Heisler and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.