Maple Sugaring in March

I always think of pure maple syrup as liquid gold--nothing else in the world tastes like it, and it's expensive!

This is how I like to think of gathering maple sap.  See the bucket hanging on the maple tree?  That's how maple sugaring used to be done.  The farmer would have to empty the buckets full of sap into containers on a giant sled pulled by horses.  Then the sap would be brought to the sugar house and boiled over a wood fire until most of the water had evaporated to make maple syrup. Nowadays plastic tubing is connected to the tree taps and runs from several trees into large plastic 55-gallon drums--more efficient but definitely not as picturesque!  In late winter as you drive along country roads in New England, you'll often see this transparent green tubing hanging from the trees.

In March we visited Lamothe's Sugar House in nearby Burlington to watch maple syrup being made. Mr. Lamothe runs a pretty sophisticated operation--he uses a reverse osmosis system to extract about 90% of the water from the sap and then boils the remaining liquid in an oil-fired evaporator to make his maple syrup.

I have photos to share from the sugar house but for the past couple of days, Blogger has been having difficulty accessing my photo files--when these problems with Blogger have happened in the past, they seem to get fixed in a week or so.  I'll try again in a few days.