03/31/2026
Today's discussion is calamities. I know we are not the only sugar House to have these, so much can go wrong so quickly. For instance, you can run out of sap while your boiling away (thankfully this has never happened to us), you can drop a hydrometer when you essentially need it and don't have backup (Yes, we've broken hydrometers but we always have spares on hand for this reason), the power can go out when you're boiling, in the old days, not a problem, today we have blowers that we need to be going when we're boiling, (and yes this happened to us last year, we shut down immediately and went to visit a friend who was boiling and still had power), etc. Yesterday, we had a great day. So, back to yesterday, lots of sap flowing in, lots of boiling going on, lots of great people stopping in to say hey, (thank you guys, we always love seeing you all!). With that being said we were out saying goodbye to somebody and I saw Hannah look up. I turned around to see what she was looking at and I saw smoke up in a tree. Now yesterday was a beautiful day out, the sugar House inside hit 100°. (We were slugging down the fluids left and right.) Back to the story, as I was looking up to see what Hannah was looking at, I saw it. I said holy moly. Hannah had heard something but did not see what I saw. I saw smoke. Yep, maple tree was smoldering. The worst part about it, this is a maple tree that holds a main line coming to the sugar house drawing in all the sap from our old sugar woods. I called upon our very own prior 1st assistant fire chief, Jake. We dragged out the hose, he was the only one that was tall enough, with the ladder to hit the hot spot. We continued to spray everywheres around the sugar house as it was very dry lately. Thank goodness for the rain last night. I went down to grab some stuff from the sugar House and lo and behold, the limb was on the ground, the one that was burning yesterday. I am very thankful it did not drag that main line down. So yes, a calamity, it could have been worse and I'm thankful it was not.
