Crick Paine, a volunteer sugarer at River Bend Farm, in Uxbridge, heads off to the next set ot red maple trees at the farm Thursday. Sugarers, as they are konown, have devised an elaborate system for tapping the sap out of trees, allowing more sap to be harvested. Call photo/Ernest A. Brown

Learn about the process from tree to table at Blackstone Valley Sugaring Association’s Maple Sugar Days this month

By JOSEPH FITZGERALD 

UXBRIDGE -- Seventy-six-year-old Crick Paine barely breaks a sweat as he trudges a quarter mile through the snow, mud and brush at Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park. Deftly brushing a tangled tree branch away from his windburned face, he moves with the speed and agility of a man half his age.

The hike finally ends in a secluded wooded thicket where Paine points to a web of blue plastic tubing that connects a ring of red maples.
“There it is,” he says. “This is where it happens.”
This is the spot Paine and other volunteers with the Blackstone Valley Sugaring Association like to show the thousands of visitors from Massachusetts and Rhode Island who come to the state park every March to learn the art of maple sugaring. But if you’re expecting to find a Currier & Ives scene of traditional metal sap buckets and horse-drawn sleds, you might be a little disappointed. What you will find is an intricate web of strategically-placed high-tech tubing that taps dozens of trees and sends the sap flowing into single 10-gallon plastic containers.
Most modern syrup makers use a tube system to collect the sap. The tree has a small hole drilled into it, and then a small spout, or tap, is placed into the hole. The sap runs out of the tap into a long piece of plastic tubing which can connect more than 100 trees at a time. The sap will run through the tubing — which stays connected all year — and flow into a main container, or holding tank.
Paine, a retired school principal who moved to Massachusetts in 1958, remembers sugaring done the old-fashioned way. He grew up just outside of Keene, N.H., on a family farm in the small town of West Moreland, which is as rural today as it was when Paine was growing up there 60 years ago.
An agricultural community along the Connecticut River, West Moreland remains a town with no high speed Internet or curbside trash pickup and where folks still pump their water from private wells.
“I was raised on a farm that did maple sugaring commercially,” says Paine, a Northbridge resident and Blackstone Valley Sugaring Association volunteer for the past three years. “We grew sweet corn and vegetables in the summer, cut cordwood in the winter and made maple sugar in the spring.”
As a boy, Paine and his brothers would help their father tap hundreds of trees and hang more than a 1,000 sap buckets during the sugaring season. Once the sap was collected, it was drawn away by horse and wagon to the sugar house a couple of miles away. Paine would have to carry two big buckets himself often in knee-deep snow.
Maple sugar season in New Hampshire always coincided with mud season. Mud season in New Hampshire and Vermont happens when the frozen dirt roads heated and melted by the warm spring sun turn into mud — and lots of it. The mud makes roads treacherous and impassable until summer warmth dries it up.
“Today, the kids have April vacation. Back then, we had mud vacation,” Paine chuckles.
Maple syrup is made in the Northeastern United States and Southeastern Canada, and the maple season usually lasts 4-6 weeks. The days and length of the sap runs depend entirely on the weather.
Maple sugaring time in these parts typically runs from the middle of February until the trees start to bud in early April.
As the frozen sap in the maple tree thaws, it begins to move and build up pressure within the tree. When the internal pressure reaches a certain point, sap will flow from any fresh wound in the tree. It takes 35-40 gallons of sap to boil down to one gallon of syrup.
Sap won’t run if it’s too cold or too warm, so finding that delicate balance can be a bit tricky for novices. Freezing nights and warm sunny days create the pressure needed for a good sap harvest. A clear spring day, with thawing evenings is perhaps the right time to tap a hole into a sugar maple.
“Night time temperatures of between 20-25 degrees and daytime temperatures between 30-40 are about right,” Paine explains.
A west wind will also help get the sap running.
“My father used to say if the wind shifted to the northwest it would turn the sap off like a faucet,” he says.
Sugar maples have the most sugar in their sap but other maples such as the red maple, silver maple, and ash-leafed maple, can also be tapped, although their sap isn’t quite as sweet and the sap doesn’t flow as long, he says. Properly cared for sugar maples can be tapped at 40 years of age and will yield sap for 100 years or more.
The Blackstone Valley Sugaring Association has more than 250 taps collecting sap through its sophisticated blue tubing system, but it also does it the traditional way with metal buckets. Those taps are closer to the River Bend Farm visitor center at the park and used for demonstrations for the hordes of children and students who visit every March to take part in the association’s Maple Sugar Days held on the first three weekends in March (this year on March 7- 8, 14-15 and 21-22). The program averages 2,000 visitors a year.
Sponsored by the Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park, state park staff along with association volunteers and National Park Service rangers show how to gather the maple sap and make it into syrup. Tours at the visitor center on Oak Street start every 25 minutes and last about 1 1/2 hours. Guests learn how to tap the trees and boil the sap, visit the sugar house and even sample a sweet maple sugar treat.
The Blackstone Valley Sugaring Association, founded by Uxbridge residents Bill and Valerie Paul, is a non-profit organization whose mission is to support and foster maple sugaring education and activities and the preservation of maple trees throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
“The emphasis here is education,” says Paine. “We want to educate people who may be interested in backyard sugaring.”
Anyone looking to tap a few trees in their backyard should make sure they are at least 10 to 11 inches in diameter and 4 1/2 feet above the ground. The next step is to drill a 7/16 inch diameter hole in the trunk, two or three inches deep, and then lightly tap a spiel into the hole. Backyard do-it-your-selfers can either hang a bucket, can or plastic milk jug from the spiel to catch the sap as it drips out.
Though sap itself is not sweet, the boiling or freezing of it adds a sweetened taste.
Amateurs can boil the sap in a large stainless steel pot or pan. The syrup will be finished when it’s 13C (7F) hotter than when it first boiled (about 104C or 219F). The faster the sap is boiled, the higher the quality. The finished syrup can be strained through clean cheesecloth or a food-approved filter to remove any bits of debris, as well as any crystallized minerals.
After association volunteers collect their sap it is transported to the sugar house, which was built last year across the street from the visitor center and includes a professional-sized indoor evaporator. Hauling the sap to the sugar house is done with a John Deere utility vehicle which holds a 125-gallon plastic tank. Volunteers drive through the woods to the main containers connected to the tubing system, empty them into the tank and then drive back to the sugar house where the sap is piped to the evaporator.
The sap is boiled down in the evaporator over a blazing hot fire. As the steam rises from the evaporator pans, the sap becomes more concentrated until it finally reaches the proper density to be classified as syrup.
“In the old days, my dad would use a dipper to see if the syrup ‘aprons off’ from the edge of the dipper,” Paine says.
The syrup is then drawn from the evaporator, filtered, graded and bottled. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of pure maple syrup.
The syrup is bottled and used as samples during demonstrations. The association also partners with Warren Farm in Brookfield, which uses the syrup to make maple sugar products.
A maple sugar product Paine remembers enjoying as a kid was called “sugar-on-snow,” a delicacy that has been a traditional spring-time favorite at sugar houses and sugar camps for over 200 years.
“We would boil the sap beyond the boiling stage and then pour it over some fresh clean packed snow,” he says.
Because it cools so rapidly, the supersaturated solution does not have a chance to crystallize and will form a thin glassy, chewy, taffy-like sheet over the snow.
“It was a special treat that we would eat with a pickle to offset the sweetness,” says Paine.
For more information on the Blackstone Valley Sugaring Association, visit them on the Web at www.blackstonevalleysugaring.org or call (508) 278-5274.