Next week daytime temperatures will regularly get above freezing while nights will be cold. Midweek we enter the month of March and meteorological spring. Time to start watching for maple sugaring buckets and sap lines in the local sugar bush.
sap buckets in place
Photo by J. Harrington
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Those of us who really enjoy maple syrup on our pancakes and waffles cross our fingers that the days warm quickly, but not too much, so sap will continue to flow. That kind of pattern also makes for a slow but consistent snow melt that helps minimize spring flooding. I continue to believe it’s unfortunate that the snow has to melt before the ground can unfreeze, but no one asked my opinion on the design of spring. Frozen ground prevents or severely limits aquifer and groundwater recharge. So, to enjoy syrup and avoid or minimize flooding, I have to temper my desire to see all the snow gone ASAP and accept some tradeoffs. Much of life is like that.
Our snow depth ranking is above average for this time of year. I’m not sure how soon we can anticipate complete loss of snow cover, but we’re a month or more from early ice out in local lakes, so I’m guessing we’ll see the snow gone well after mid-March, say between St. Patrick’s Day and Easter. This is almost as tantalizing as the day after Thanksgiving’s expectation’s of Christmas, but the arrival of that holiday is more certain than an ice out date.
Goddess of Maple at Evening
Chard deNiord - 1952-
She breathed a chill that slowed the sap inside the phloem, stood perfectly still inside the dark, then walked to a field where the distance crooned in a small blue voice how close it is, how the gravity of sky pulls you up like steam from the arch. She sang along until the silence soloed in a northern wind, then headed back to the sugar stand and drank from a maple to thin her blood with the spirit of sap. To quicken its pace to the speed of sound then hear it boom inside her heart. To quicken her mind to the speed of light with another suck from the flooded tap.
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