428 



MAPLE-SUGAR 



MAPLE-SUGAR 



sold on the market. There is more incentive to 

 improve a money crop than one which the family 

 uses, and hence the industry developed rapidly. 

 Processes were made more economical and labor- 

 saving and the products more toothsome and 

 cleaner. But, oddly enough, while quality was en- 

 hanced to the last degree, no larger crops were 

 harvested. The situation was and is an anomalous 

 one. The consuming population of 1907 is thrice 

 that of 1850, its purchasing power much greater 

 and its per capita expenditure for food larger than 

 ever before. The demand for maple products is 

 many times the supply ; a good grade brings re- 

 munerative prices, the work is done at a time when 

 other farm work is not pressing, the crop is peren- 

 nial, the draft on the soil slight, the material used 

 of little value, the cost of apparatus once obtained 

 but slight ; and yet the supply is short. 



The reasons for a diminishing supply in the face 

 of an increased demand are two. One is avoidable, 

 the other unavoidable. They are adulteration and 

 the weather. Prior to the passage of the pure food 



Fig. 649. The sugar-bush at the close of the season. Vermont. 



law it was aptly and probably truly said that there 

 was ten times as much maple-syrup made in Chicago 

 as in Vermont. The Chicago brand is made of 

 glucose or cane-sugar, perhaps flavored with a 

 little of the lowest grade and strongest tasting 

 maple and perhaps not. The weather, however, is 

 an all-controlling and uncontrollable factor, in that 

 it may favor a long-continued flow or cause only 

 brief and irregular runs. A day may make or mar 

 the success of a crop. If the right sort of weather 

 comes at just such a time, provided the wrong kind 

 of weather has not preceded it, an average crop or 

 better may be gathered. But, if seasonal conditions 

 do not favor, the product may be but a half or a 

 fourth of a crop ; and nothing can be done to 

 remedy this condition. 



Nature of the maple grove. (Fig. 649.) 



There are several sorts of maples kriown to bot- 

 anists, but only two are of importance as sugar- 

 producers, — the sugar or rock maple (Acer saccha- 

 rinum, Pig. 452) and the red maple (Acer rubrum), 

 the former being the more common one in the East, 



[Unfortunately, the specific name saccharinum has 

 been revived recently by some botanists for the 

 silver maple (A. dasyearpum) which is not a prom- 

 inent sugar-producing species, thus restoring, to 

 no purpose, a confusion of the earlier botanists.] 

 The sugar maple is a stately forest tree, at home 

 on the cool uplands and rocky hillsides of western 

 New England, the Adirondack region in eastern 

 New York, the Western Reserve of Ohio and along 

 the Appalachian region as far south as the Caro- 

 linas. In all these regions it is a commercial tree, 

 either as a source of sugar, of timber, or of both. 

 The red or swamp maple grows along stream bor- 

 ders and on the lower lands, particularly if not 

 well drained, and is more common west than east. 

 The sugar-maker's forest is variously called a 

 grove, orchard, place, works and bush, the last 

 being in many sections the colloquial term. The 

 groves are of all sorts and sizes. The small boy 

 taps the roadside maple in the spring-time and 

 hangs an empty tin pail on a rusty nail to catch 

 the slowly dropping sap ; and the great Adirondack 

 camp, with its railroad system winding 

 among its 40,000 trees, does no more except 

 on a larger scale. Some of the groves stand 

 on level land, some on slopes, some crown 

 ridges, some are of first-growth, — there are 

 not many of these left, — and more are of 

 second-growth trees. Some are nearly clear 

 maple forests, while in others are mingled 

 with the maples such trees as the birches, 

 beech, basswood, spruce and hemlock. 



The ideal sugar grove contains the 

 largest number of trees to a given area 

 consistent with a full development of the 

 top, a reserve of smaller growth, however, 

 coming on to replace the failing or fallen 

 maple monarchs. Its soil is well covered 

 with a humus layer, a litter of leaves, grass- 

 less and weedless. It is not the number of 

 trees that is important, but the amount and 

 vigor of the foliage; the spread of the tree 

 rather than its trunk, for the leaves are the sugar 

 factories and the sunlight their source of power. 

 The chlorophyll or green coloring matter of the leaf 

 under the infiuence of the sunlight welds the car- 

 bonic acid gas of the air and the water of the 

 sap into starch, which is stored throughout the 

 tree, the next spring to pass as sugar in the sap to 

 the buds for the building of the new leaf structure 

 as well as for the making of the new wood. A small 

 leaf area or one that is so crowded in a dense growth 

 as to be but poorly exposed to the sunlight cannot 

 lay up much starch, and lack of starch means lack 

 of sugar. The thick humus layer on the forest floor 

 is only second in importance to the foliage expanse, 

 for it is the water reservoir of the forest. Indeed, 

 so vitally essential is this soil cover of leaf-mold 

 to the well-being of the industry that many sugar- 

 makers think that the forest trees yield more 

 sugar than do those in the open and exposed on 

 every side. Careful experiments, however, indicate 

 that the sap yields, other things being equal, bear 

 a direct relation to the size and exposure of the 

 tree-top. 



