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A weblog about the politics and affairs of the old and glorious City of Albany, New York, USA. Articles written and disseminated from Albany's beautiful and historic South End by Daniel Van Riper. If you wish to make a response, have anything to add or would like to make an empty threat, please contact me.


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March 26, 2019

Maple Sugaring Time In The South End

And a visit to the farm to find out how it’s done

The white buckets had been sitting under the maple trees that line Morton Avenue for weeks before they actually registered on my conscious mind.  That sudden awakening of my awareness happened on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of March when I was circling the block with my pickup, about to load it with usable stuff from our house that we didn’t want.  The plan was to take our stuff to a dropoff point for the Albany Really Really Free Market, which takes place every three months at the Albany Social Justice Center on 33 Central Avenue. But that’s another story in itself.

Anyway, as I slowly drove down Morton, I made a frowny-faced study of the white, five gallon buckets under the trees, and I decided they sure looked to me like maple sap collectors, some 22 by my count from ML King Boulevard to Eagle Street.  My first thought was that somebody was stealing sap from our beloved trees brazenly in the open, which is often the best way to get away with stuff like that.  But who would do such a thing?  Maple sugaring is, after all, some hard work that takes skill.  It’s much easier to go buy some at the supermarket.

Sap Collection Buckets On Morton Avenue
Sap Collection Buckets On Morton Avenue

So after we dropped off our usable crap at what turned out to be a house just outside Albany in Menands, I did an inspection of this sap stealing operation.  My main worry was that the trees were being damaged by someone selfish that didn’t care what he or she was doing. To whom, I wondered, could I report this attack on our trees during the weekend? Come Monday morning would the authorities even care?  Perhaps I should take this matter into my own hands?

On close inspection I was relieved to see that the sap collection was being done neatly and expertly.  Only two little holes had been bored into the base of the trees, and unlike the collection lines at maple sugar farms the two tubes that ran from the trees to the buckets were short and narrow gauge.  Clearly whoever did this was not being greedy, taking care as much as possible to not stress the trees any more than necessary.

This was my real concern, stress to the trees.  On some maple sugar farms you might notice the trees that get tapped every Spring look kind of narrow and spindly, not happy and expansive. Not always, but often enough. Consider that every single year when the trees wake up and begin to expend energy to grow leaves, some (mostly) hairless monkeys come along and literally suck the vital life blood from their capillaries.  Add to this that on Morton Avenue these are urban street trees that are under a great deal of stress already from passing cars, their noise, their air pollution, and vibrations.  Is bleeding them a good idea?

Sticker On The Sides Of The Buckets
Sticker On The Sides Of The Buckets

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about the legitimacy and competence of the sap collectors.  It took me a while but I finally noticed the stickers on the side of each bucket that explained this was a project of the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center, the South End’s fabulous urban farm located on Warren Street on the other side of Lincoln Park from my house.  I also noted the official seal of the City of Albany on the stickers, which meant that for better or worse the authorities heartily sanctioned this operation.

The fact is, if anybody could do this sort of thing properly then Radix could.  Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew have been managing this innovative urban farm since they started building it in 2009, providing fresh farm goods to the neighbors, along with educational opportunities for students from local grade schools all the way up to graduate schools.  The current City administration has recognized Radix as an innovative cultural and economic driver that deserves encouragement. Thus it was no surprise to see the City imprint on the sides of the buckets.

Looking at the Radix page on Spacebook, I noted that they’d had a boiling operation more than a week earlier, on March 7.  I’m annoyed with myself for having missed this, so I can’t give any details about how much sap was collected or such.  I decided I’d find out if there was going to be another public sap boiling that I could visit, or at the very least what their plans were.

Kids Testing Finished Maple Syrup At Radix
Kids Testing Finished Maple Syrup At Radix

You see, I had talked to a maple farmer at the Troy Farmer’s Market last weekend, she told me that they had barely started sugaring (collecting sap) because it’s been so cold.  The sap flows best during that late winter period when the nights are cold and the temperature gets above freezing during the day.  Later in the season when day and night get too warm, the sap still flows but it is too thick and full of, well, nutrients that the trees need to thrive and survive, which we parasitic hairless monkeys consider impurities. 

The late season sap is your “grade C dark amber,” which usually gets mixed in with processed food or is choked down by people who pretend it’s tastier than the light amber stuff from earlier in the season.  Years ago big food corporations would buy the darkest almost inedible very late season stuff from maple farmers and add a little bit of it to their corn syrup (usually 2%) so they could legally call the glop maple syrup.  But due to complaining consumer groups this deceptive legal loophole was changed and the corporations couldn’t make that claim any more, which sadly hit the maple farmers hard for a while. But it also gave the poor a trees a break from very late season bleeding, which is damaging to them.

Sap Collector In Action
Sap Collector In Action

The maple farmer I hd talked to in Troy told me she was looking forward to the following week because the predictions were that the weather would be just right for sap production, and they were.  Of course in Nassau in Rensselaer County where her farm is located, some 15 miles from the South End and about 400 feet higher in elevation, it is significantly cooler there.  That farm, by the way, is Wells Maple Farm, from whom we’ve been buying the maple cream that I dutifully spread every morning on The Wife’s english muffins ever since we first found them years ago selling at a county fair. It’s really good stuff.

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Radix has already harvested enough sap to have already had a syrup boiling, it’s a lot warmer in downtown Albany than the outer suburbs.  Checking with an authority on maple sugaring I see the following:

In a normal season, a single taphole produces approximately 10- to 12-gallons of sap. Your finished yield of syrup will depend on the sugar content of your sap. Generally, assume a 40-to-1 conversion – so 12 gallons of sap will boil down to 1 quart of syrup. 

So I figured it was likely that those five gallon buckets in Lincoln Park have been filling up fast. Sure enough, that was the case.  On a Monday morning I stopped over at Radix and found the guy who was in charge of the maple sugaring operation, Ben Atwood.  His title is Garden Coordinator, but he quickly explained to me that his duties involved a lot more than coordinating gardens.  That day he was in charge of the entire farm since both Scott and Stacy were out of town.

Ben Shows Me The High Tech Sap Boiling Facility
Ben Shows Me The High Tech Sap Boiling Facility

Ben told me the public boiling I’d missed the other day was actually the second sap boiling, they’d already processed about 120 gallons of sap.  Which sounds like a lot, until you realize that the ratio of sap to usable syrup is about 40 to 1.  All this 120 gallons of sap has yielded is two and a half gallons of syrup, or probably a bit more because of all the testing of the final product by the visiting school kids.  Think about that next time you slather real maple syrup on your pancakes.

Ben Shows Me The Pot Of Sap Ready For Final Processing, Note The State Of The Art Refrigeration
Ben Shows Me The Pot Of Sap Ready For Final Processing, Note The State Of The Art Refrigeration

Much of the boiling took place here on the farm at an outdoors fire pit fueled by logs, a total of 12 hours over two days.  Once the sap has been reduced to a more manageable quantity it is taken over to the nearby Children’s Cafe on Warren Street, a church-run project providing healthy meals to indigent South End kids.  The kitchens stoves there are much more efficient than outdoor fire pits used for the initial boiling, the final boiling of the sap took another four hours. That’s 16 hours total.

Partially Boiled Sap Looks Good To Me
Partially Boiled Sap Looks Good To Me

Ben showed me a big pot of sap that had already gotten the 12 hour boiling treatment and was ready to be taken up the street for the final boil.  It was parked in a shady spot with packed snow and covered with a tarp, he removed the lid and I could see the sap was already a nice brown color.  He invited me to take a little taste of it with my finger, assuring me I wouldn’t contaminate it since it was about to seriously sterilized again anyway.  As expected it was watery but tasty, I would totally pour it on my pancakes just the way it was, or even drink it straight from a glass.

So yeah, a lot of work for a small yield.  On traditional family farms back in the old days, February and March were mostly down times preparing for the coming planting season, so they had time for sugaring work.  Back then stuff like cane sugar was a luxury in this part of the country, especially away from the coastal Cities. Spending time and effort maple sugaring at the end of winter made sense, a practice the invading Europeans are said to have learned from the Native Americans.

Ben Shows Me The Yield So Far
Ben Shows Me The Yield So Far

New York is the number two state for maple sugar production, no surprise that Vermont is far and away number one, producing three times as much as New York.  I expect that hasn’t always been true, for some two hundred years Vermont was the number one producer of pitch pine tar, which was considered the highest quality pitch for use on wooden sailing vessels.  Of course that industry ended when wooden ships disappeared over 100 years ago.  Today if you look at Vermont forests and tree stands you see a lot of maple trees but hardly any pitch pines.

The Radix sugaring project is funded by part of a $3400.00 grant from the Albany County legislature, a welcome surprise to find that the County also supports Radix along with the City.  The mandate with the City stipulates that the sugaring project end by April 1st, Ben told me he expects to have the buckets removed well before then.  All told there are about 30 trees tapped, besides the 22 on Morton the rest are at the base of the steep winter sledding hill at Morton and Hawk Street, the former site of the Irish community called Martinsville that was evicted to make room for the public park.

Ben Talks To Visitors At The Chicken And Duck Pen
Ben Talks To Visitors At The Chicken And Duck Pen

So again I wonder, is this sugaring project damaging the trees?  Ben told me a detail I found alarming, that most of the trees filled up the five gallon buckets at a rate of about three days, which he thought was kind of slow.  But some of the trees filled the buckets a lot slower than that, a few trees hardly anything at all or nothing.  Surely a tree’s yield of sap can be translated into an indicator of tree health.

Like I said, these urban trees are already under a lot of stress from the cars passing by. is this bleeding of sap damaging them?  The sources I look at say that if a maple farmer follows certain guidelines then tapping will not affect the health of a tree at all, and it appears that Radix is following these rules.  One should not tap a tree that is less than eight inches in diameter and less than 40 years old.  Nor should one tap a tree late in the season when the nutrients the tree needs to live are in the sap, I suspect this practice of late season tapping is what makes the trees on some maple farms look unhealthy.

But clearly if some of the trees along Morton Avenue and in the interior of Lincoln Park are yielding little or no sap then that is an indication that they are in poor health.  It seems to me that it would be a worthwhile job for Radix, or I suppose that would be up to Ben, to assess the health of each tree based on the amount of sap it yielded.  This information could help determine which trees needed assistance, and certainly if a tree is not yielding sap it should not be tapped again in the future.

Along Morton Avenue
Along Morton Avenue

Finally, Ben told me that a season’s worth of work in Lincoln Park is likely to produce about six or seven gallons of syrup in total.  Not a lot, is that worth the effort?  I would say yes because the most important aspect is that the local kids get to see how it is done, along with some of the adults.  That has always been Radix’ main focus, education.  After all, the youth of today may very well need to learn to grow and find their own food, and at the very least teach them to have at least some freedom from food dependence.  These fat times we live in may very well not last.


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Comments:
If you are having difficulties posting a comment, please email Daniel Van Riper. We are experimenting with our spam filters, and we do not want to exclude any legitimate commenters, just spammers!


Posted by:Frank Smith
Posted on:03/27/2019
Comments:
The second weekend of Maple Weekend is coming up March 23 and 24 up north. The pancake breakfasts help support our farmers and the Dry Brook Sugar House even includes horse and wagon rides with the price.


Posted by:Daniel Van Riper
Posted on:03/27/2019
Comments:
Frank - Well we missed that. Wasn't last weekend the Vermont maple boiling day, a sort of unofficial State holiday? Any other Maple Weekends coming up? They sound like fun.


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