MAKING MAPLE SUGAR. 717 



N. TALCOTT, 



JEFFERSON, ASHTABULA COUNTY. 



Stock — Making Sugar — Buildings — Results. 



STOCK FARM, 



My farm contains one hundred and sixty acres, forty, of 

 which are timber — beech, maple and white wood. I have a 

 nice white maple, or hard maple, sugar orchard of about four 

 hundred trees. I now use three hundred of them every season 

 for this purpose. I make the purest sweet ever known to 

 man. My mode of conducting this business is very simple, 

 cheap and economical. I do no work for the fun of it alone, 

 but aim in all things to do it well ; and the higher culture I 

 give to all my farm operations, the better my returns. 



My timber land and all my farm is in three gentle rolling 

 ridges. 1 have no waste land or need of underdrains. The 

 woods are as nice every Spring to make sugar in as it is pos- 

 sible to have clay soil. 



MAKING MAPLE SUGAR. 



I use heavy tin buckets, flaring a little. They hold eleven 

 quarts each, and have a hole near the top of each to hang them 

 on the sap spout. The spouts are made of tin. 1 liave tin 

 covers for all my buckets that go over the spout and bucket, 

 so that no impurities can ever get to my sap. It is then kept 

 gathered up close, and never allowed to sour in the buckets. 

 I store it in a galvanized iron cistern that holds twenty barrels. 

 I draw from this by a faucet a steady stream of sap into a 

 galvanized iron pan heater, placed on a brick arch. My hot 

 sap from this heater flows continually into another larger pan, 

 thirty-two by eighty-two inches, six inches deep, set a little 

 lower on the arch. I sirup off a batch every three hours, be- 

 cause sap needs to be converted into molasses as rapidly as 



