What Forests Give

SUGAR FROM TREES

To take the bark from an oak or a hemlock in order to get the tannin it contains, of course kills the tree, but there are very valuable things inside trees which we can get without cutting them down, or chopping them up. There is, for example, so delectable a thing as maple sugar. Early in the spring in the hard-maple country—possibly on a warm February day, certainly by March—some farmer's boy, feeling the sun warm on his back and seeing tiny streams creeping from under the glistening edges of the old snowdrifts, fingers the jackknife in his pants' pocket, and starts for the wood lot. The bark of the sugar maple is not thick, and before long he comes back on the trot.

"Sap's running!"

Then the farm force mobilizes. It gathers its buckets and its spigots, tugs out the big kettle, and hurries through the melting snow to catch that first run of faintly sweet sap which is carrying the sugar that has been stored all winter below ground, up through the trunk to give the tree a quick get-away in the growing race of the spring. Only the first run of sap carries the sugar, so that the work must be rushed. The kettle is swung up, a fire built beneath, and the pails of sap emptied into the kettle as fast as they fill. The process of making the sugar is the simple one of keeping the kettle boiling till enough of the water has gone off in steam so that the sirup which is left will crystallize. The only real point for anxiety is that moment when the sirup is undecided whether to burn into charcoal or crystallize into sugar.

The making of maple sugar has expanded, just as the making of butter has, from a thing that every farmer who owned a sugar bush did in the spring, to a large business operated by specialists with special equipment, but the process is essentially the same old one that the early Americans used.

"Sap's Running"