Isherwood column: Sugaring in Whitaker’s Woods
By Justin Isherwood
Sugaring this year is different. Since 1974, my wife and I have sugared in what we call Whitaker’s Woods after Garth who owned the Sport Shop on Main Street. Garth was a local kid, his parents farmed nearby, Garth matriculated from the one-room school where I started my academic career. No laptops, each first grader got a fabulous fat red mechanical pencil on their first day of class. The kind of device to inspire writing.
Whittakers eventually sold my dad the 40 acres including the woodlot, another neighbor sold an adjoining 40 a few years later. In my farm career, I joined the 80 acres north, pretty much the standard tale of a farmstead. True to the old faith the acquired fields yet known by their antecedent owners.
Whittaker’s Woods was 20 acres if closer to 17 – oak to the south end, north the landscape included an old creek bed, the soil heavier, maple trees were profligate, reds mostly.
In 1974, we began sugaring as do most, on a whim after reading a piece in the New Yorker. If also fueled by stories told by my grandfather, his sugaring circa 1900 with remnant Indians who had not yet succumbed to the reservation and roamed the antic vacancy of the Buena Vista Marsh, slightly indisposed to agriculture.
As with all things amateur, our first sugar equipment was haphazard – cement blocks for a boiling arch, a flat pan of folded galvanized bought at Cash & Carry hardware, attached to wood handles as soon burnt off, water pipe after that. We collected in ice cream buckets; the spiles were sections of quarter inch pipe, only to add a bit brace.
As is our human mechanical nature, our sugaring kit evolved. Bought used pans from Reynolds in Aniwa, $50 worth of solder later a pretty nifty set-up. Fragile, but nifty. The arch was sourced from bits of a barn cleaner, a gravity box and some silo pipe.
The reader needn’t know the details. One fatal night the sap went low in the evaporator, the concentrated sugar caught fire and my rebuilt evaporating pan disappeared into the embers. Hint, don’t start drinking beer until the fire is out.
We bought a $400 Grimm stainless steel, flued evaporator, a month’s salary at the time – precious stuff. In 198, we built a sugar barn of, what else, old barn lumber bought used sap buckets, including several wood ones, 150 trees. The wood ones had to be soaked in water before the season.
Since my kids have sugared, my grandkids. Schools visited, Elder Hostel, 4-H, college classes.
I enjoy the selfish couple weeks of sugaring as an elemental way to begin the farm season. After collecting sap for weeks, through snow and mire with full buckets and a carrying yoke, it puts farm work in a nice perspective.
My potato planting tractor now has auto-steer; damnably criminal thing to do to honorable farming.
In July 2019, straight line winds hit Central Wisconsin, power was out for most of a week, trees down everywhere, Whittaker’s woods is no more – 80 percent of the trees sheared off or uprooted. The sugar barn was intact but no woods.
As a landsman, including the irrigator, of Central Wisconsin I believe in trees, that my right to irrigate is with some precision determined by the ratio of my farm’s recharge to my use of groundwater. Woodlands do not necessarily recharge any better than bare ground, but look several brands of heaven better than bare ground. Only to add, habitat matters.
My farm has woods – 20 percent of our farm footprint is wooded, about 300 acres. Due east of my house is a woods called Gilman’s; she my Sunday School teacher who taught the neighborhood kids how to play piano. One morning in Sunday School, as a smart-mouth kid, I ridiculed her for identifying the grain in a poster of Jesus as corn. Mister wise guy saying the Old World didn’t have corn. She, the woman who at the Christmas Eve service wrapped chocolate chip cookies in foil, a jar of dill pickles and a wedge of Wisconsin cheese for the gold, frankincense and myrrh presented to baby Jesus. She who sold Mister Smart-mouth her farm 15 years later. I yet have that Christmas eve pickle jar of Mrs. Olive Gilman. And a sugar camp set up in Olive’s woods.
Come summer, I will build a new sugar barn of the lumber from the pine logs from Whittaker’s Woods, roofing from a blown down shed. Life is like that.