Slide 2:
This is Jacques Couture, but people call him Jake. He owns the Couture Farm. They sugar--or make maple syrup--there.
Inside the Sugar House :
Inside the Sugar House The sap runs down from the sugarbush to the sugar house.
Jake boils the sap in the evaporator.
The Old Milk Truck :
The Old Milk Truck Jake uses an old milk truck to collect the sap at the sugar house.
It crashed, but he fixed it.
More Inside the Sugar House :
More Inside the Sugar House They need the wood to put under the evaporator to make the fire. They use 20 cords of wood in one sugar season!
The Pipeline :
The Pipeline Jake puts plastic taps into the sugar maple trees. Then he connects the taps with small blue tubes. The sap flows out the taps, into the blue tubes, and then into bigger tubes that take it to the sugar house.
Out in the Sugar Bush :
Out in the Sugar Bush
The Grandfather Tree :
The Grandfather Tree Jake put in 7,500 taps this year. Some trees have more than one tap, like this one--the Grandfather Tree. Jake guesses this tree is about 350 years old. Farmers have probably tapped it for over 100 years! Even though it looks old and dead, it has a lot of living parts left, and it produces lots of sap.
Sugar On Snow :
Sugar On Snow At the end of our visit, Pauline Couture made sugar on snow for us. She poured the soft maple sugar on the snow and it hardened. We put our forks in and twirled them around to pick it up and eat it. It tasted like maple syrup, but it’s really sticky like Starburst or taffy.