The Call of the Sugar Bush

By Peter Kuitenbrouwer

Maple syrup production in Canada is a serious industry. Last spring, Quebec producers cranked out 13.2 million gallons of what they call sirop d’érable. That’s 90 per cent of Canada’s syrup, and 75 per cent of the global supply.

Ontario and New Brunswick, by comparison, are supporting actors in the great performance of sugaring off. Combined, these provinces make eight per cent of Canada’s maple syrup output. Even so, the 467,000 gallons Ontario produced last year sounds pretty impressive.

And then there are the smaller player, the hobby farms whose production probably doesn’t even make it into the statistics, but who contribute significantly to spreading the joy that is the annual ritual of boiling sap for the sweet gold of spring.

March is the time to make syrup, a skill settlers learned from the First people. Sap runs when there is snow on the ground, sunny days above zero, and crisp nights. And so, at the end of February, I ventured to Madoc, where my family maintains a sugar bush, to tap the maple trees. I found the woods blanketed with a prodigious quantity of snow. The Inuit have 50 words for snow, one of which, muruaneq, apparently translates to “soft deep snow.”

Attempting to traverse this muruaneq resembled walking through oatmeal; even wearing snowshoes, I sank about halfway to the knee. Coco, our dog, could barely keep up.

I skied out into the sugar bush and then switched to snowshoes. But, alas, I had brought the wrong size of drill bit for boring holes in the trees (for steel taps, the correct size is 7/16”). Two more grueling out-and-back trips later, I returned, hauling stacks of buckets and lids, a bag of spiles, a drill, and a hammer. Coco and I then plunged into the snowbanks that lined the trails to drill small holes in the maples. Into each hole I tapped a spile, hung a bucket, and affixed a lid.

Morning brought a blizzard of wet snow. Soaked but undaunted, we kept tapping. Three days of hard work saw 40 buckets hanging from spiles.

The next job is sap collection. We gather sap in tall white plastic buckets, hauled on a toboggan. We then pour the sap into a holding tank: a drum perched on a kind of tower, with a hose running to the evaporator. Then, we light a fire under the evaporator pan and keep it well stoked with wood to boil the sap for many hours. Thirty litres of sap and up to 24 hours of stoking result in one litre of syrup – a labour of love.

In the woods, day by day, as you gather sap, boil it, and bottle syrup, the snow slowly melts. The dog scampers freely. With a soft gurgle, the creek awakens. Birds’ songs multiply. Just a few more brimming buckets of sap to schlep, and it will be spring.

Happy sugaring off, everybody!