Here are some good spring memories of a trip Kim, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jeremiah's friend Adrian McCarthy, and I made up to Frank and Betty Holmes' place to see their sugaring operation. Re-posted with their permission--and my thanks. --Pastor Jim
Sweet
For our friends Frank and Betty Holmes the sweetness of Spring tastes like maple. Frank’s father planted a small grove of Ohio sugar maples back in the early 60′s, and Frank and Betty carry on the family tradition of sugaring. It’s certainly unusual to find this in Washington State, but the family history goes back to Vermont, so they come by it honestly.
Last Saturday they began the process of boiling the sap they have been collecting through March, so we drove up to take a look. (We picked up Adrian, a friend of Jeremiah’s, on the way.) As you can see by the T shirts and shorts, our weather has warmed up enough to stop the flow of sap.
It takes warm days and cold nights to get the sap flowing just right, with the perfect window usually sometime in March. The sap rises during the warmth of the day, then flows back down in the evening as the chill settles in again. Some of that down-flowing sap trickles out of the taps and into the collectors. Frank and Betty use milk jugs, as you can see on the trees behind Betty.
Back at the sugar shack we waited for Frank to fire up the propane burners again.
We were able to dip a tin cup into a big tub of sap and take a sip; it’s like water with just a touch of sweetness to it.
Frank had turned everything off while taking a break, but he quickly got everything organized again.
It wasn’t long before the sap was bubbling away. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. They collected 70 gallons of sap this year. So they will hope to get a good gallon and a half of syrup.
So Frank will be out here in the sugar shack for awhile, but he figures he should get it all boiled down by the end of this week.
He’ll end up with enough syrup–and this is the good stuff–to give some away to family and selected friends (which includes us, I am very happy to say.) It will come in small jars, as befits such a rare and precious elixir. And he’ll still have plenty for his breakfast pancakes, each taste of which will be a taste of his family roots and heritage.
Sweet.
