Maple Sugaring: The Trees Announce Spring.

I don't celebrate Imbolc. Like other Pagan holidays, it has never spoken to me. It doesn't work in most of North American, in fact. I have never lived in a place where the weather on February second made one iota of difference to whether spring would come early or late. 

No matter what the calender says, spring in Vermont begins with sugaring. The very first day of spring is the day you see the first maple tree tapped.

The sap buckets sprout on the trees long before the snowdrops, but the weather has turned. Even if we get a cold snap now, we are aware that it will only last a day or two. The snow has taken on the specific texture that skiers say they enjoy and I warn the kids not to make snowballs of to hit their father.

It is not just the temperature that has changed. The quality of the light is more substantial as the angle of the sunbeams are steeper. Every bodily sense understands that the long cold is breaking up. Winter is shrouded in silence or it roars with wind. Spring announces itself with song, even before the birds return. In the sugar bush the sap drips into the galvanized steel buckets creating a high pitched musical plink.  A dozen of these on a sunny day sounds like a couple of people riffing on high pitched steel drums. The base line is provided by the stream that is chuckling then roaring as the ice breaks up.

We have snow on the ground up here in the mountains, but it's mostly gone on the valley floor.

My neighbors for whom sugaring is a commercial exercise are up and down the street with their tractor and our grey muzzled dogs play together, running up and down the trails. 

Maple sugar is a wonderful thing. It is the only form of sugar that does not lend itself to the Plantation System. A sugar  bush can only be tapped for about 6 weeks out of the year. The rest of the year the maples just grow happily in their forest with only minimal help and protection from humans.

Sugar Maples are only found in North America. From Cornell University:

Distribution and Habitat: Sugar maple is one of 148 maple species found in the Northern Hemisphere, which includes about 90 native and introduced species in the United States. The range of sugar maple in North America extends from Nova Scotia and Quebec at its northern edge, west to Ontario, southeastern Manitoba, and western Minnesota, south to southern Missouri, and east to Tennessee and northern Georgia (Figure 2). Sugar maple is most common in New England and the Great Lakes states as well as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Sugar maples can be grown in other places, but they will not yield sap without the specific weather available in these specific parts of North America. Thomas Jefferson apparently tried to sugar in Virginia, to no avail. In order for tapping to happen, there must be warm sunny days and freezing nights.


When I tap the trees, I ask for their permission. The first time I did this, I worried that the trees felt the  way I would feel if somebody stuck a needle in me and bled me. To my astonishment, the overwhelming feeling I received was pride and happiness. 

I have often asked myself, when I commune with the spirits of the land, if the answers are just my imagination. It's oddly reassuring to get these completely unexpected answers.

These trees are  proud of themselves. They are happy to be tapped. Strong healthy trees are tapped. It's almost a status symbol (as much as trees have the concept of status) to sport buckets or sugar lines.


Maple trees are prom queens of the arboreal world, "Who else?" they ask, meaning the other trees, "Who else can gift you with this treasure?" They gown themselves in red in the autumn and preen because they are the belles of the ball.

One of those strange myths that just appears in my head occurs to me. The trees seem to tell me that they are hear to help the People, both four footed and two footed, survive the until end of the winter. February and March are famine months. The sap that browsing animals can glean from chewing on the bark of the maples provides valuable calories. These trees see themselves as saving the whole forest, every year.

There are no GMO maple trees (yet) and since the trees are North American, there's no need to look for the free trade label.

Maple sugar that comes from my own trees is as untainted as any food can be in this world.