52 Photos: Maple Syrup: A Sign of Spring

On Saturday Amy and I visited the Genesee Country Village & Museum for their maple sugar festival and pancake breakfast. After filling up on pancakes smothered in delicious warm maple syrup we took the self guided tour through the sugar bush and travelled back through time to see how gathering and processing maple syrup has changed over the years.

Multiple taps and tubing used to route sap to a collection point.

One thing that has remained constant is the trees themselves and one of the improvements provided by modern techniques is the reduction in damage done to the trees during the tapping process. In days gone by, the tapping would begin by drilling a 1/2 inch or larger hole into the tree and then pounding in the metal tap. Today they use a 1/4 inch hole and plastic taps and tubing to gather sap from multiple trees and pipe it to a larger, garbage bin sized collection bucket. In some cases the farmer will run the tubing all the way to the sugar barn where the sap is boiled down to make the syrup, greatly reducing the amount of labor necessary to gather the sap.

Sap gathering as I remember it.

As we walked along the maple history trail we travelled back in time and our next stop brought us to a site depicting how the process was done in the early 1900's. This is where you see metal buckets hanging on the trees catching sap. Unlike modern day farmers with their sap plumbing, the farmers of this era had to keep up with emptying the sap buckets or run the risk of losing some of the valuable fluid as the bucket fills and overflows.

Setup for boiling down sap after it is gathered from the trees

The setup shown in the photo of a large stone walled fire place is indicative of the setups used during this era of syrup making. The farmer would likely have multiple setups like this and would travel from one to the next in a big circular trail. On his way to the next location, he would gather the sap from the trees. Once at the fire pit location, he would use a wooden trough to ease the new sap into the boiling trays, stoke the fires and move on to the next site.

Volunteer demonstrates sugar mold carving.

The final era of maple syrup making that we visited was the mid-1800s and earlier. In this era it wasn't maple syrup they were after, it was the pure maple sugar. The lack of refrigeration made keeping syrup difficult and it turns out that molded bricks of maple sugar would last and last and became a staple in the cooking of the time. Farmers would setup a sugar camp among the groves of maple trees. These groves of maples were often referred to as the sugarbush. Here the women would setup a station of large pots to boil the sap down in stages while the men gathered the sap and transported it to the camp. They would use the consistency of the sap as it boiled down to judge when it was ready to move on to the next stage of the process (see this weeks main photo above).

Wooden tap drips sap into hollowed out log.

I would classify this weeks photographs as documentary style pictures and as such I wanted to try and create a look for old time scenes that I could apply to the pictures. At the end of the blog are two other renderings of this week's main photo, the original unprocessed shot and a harsher attempt to set the photo in its intended time frame.

Close-up of wooden tap made from pine.

I've often wanted to create a pseudo sepia look that carried a hint of color with it and this weeks picture and some of the companion shots have been processed to get that look. Let me know what you think of this weeks picture and how I chose to process it vs the two other renditions below.