Our first scrapbook entry is a few pictures from our recent trip to visit cousins Phil, Joyce, and Ellen Hart. Actually the relationship is a bit more complicated - Phil is really my father's cousin, but calling them all cousins seems to work just fine. Although we did more than just make syrup when we were there, the focus was on the sap house, and that is where these pictures were taken. The first picture (on the right) is Abigail Hart and Joyce Hart taken through the steam over the evaporator. The next picture (on the left) is of Abigail and Ellen. They are almost the same age, and Abigail loves to visit Ellen at the farm.

Maple syrup is made by boiling maple sap. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. Each tap in a maple tree usually produces about 40 quarts of sap, so each tap usually generates about a quart of syrup. Phil had about 150 taps this year (1997). Some of the sap travels by plastic pipe to a holding tank. Here is Phil moving the sap from one of the holding tanks to a tank in the back of the pickup truck. The sap is boiled in the evaporator until it is nearly syrup. Sap slowly and continuously runs into the evaporator from a large tank outside. When it is nearly syrup, it is moved to the finishing pan where the fire and the heat can be better controlled. Here is a picture of Phil and I at the finishing fire and pan. I'm the one pouring the sap into the pan. A hot fire is needed to finish the syrup, so Phil had to make sure there was a good fire in the stove. After the fire has burned for a while, the best way to increase the heat (besides adding more wood) is to remove ashes and coals from the fire. The syrup is boiled in the finishing pan until the boiling temperature reaches 219 degree F. Then it's done and ready to be filtered and bottled. Filtering is necessary to remove dirt and a sugar lime that can occur. Bottling is the easy part.

At the end of the day, we ate dinner in the sap house. We cooked hot dogs on sticks in the evaporator fire. Potatos baked for dinner in the same fire. Abigail and Ellen collected some eggs from the hen house next door. We boiled them in the boiling sap in the evaporator. Here's a picture of Phil and I in front of the dinner table, with a view of the top of Ellen's head as she fishes a boiling egg out of the evaporator. When dinner was over we returned to the house to prepare for a contra dance. As there was a full moon that night, we went to the special Maple Sugar Moon Dance in Sheffield, Mass. The fires and sap flows were adjusted so that the evaporator would not overflow or burn overnight and we were quickly gone to dance the night away.