The Rural Voice, 1996-03, Page 23his accomplishment. With modern
equipment he'd make more than that
in an hour, he says, but his mother
would take that syrup to the market
to sell and the extra money made a
big difference in those days, he says.
vcntually he took over the
family farm and expanded the
maple syrup operation. One
year he reached a peak of 3,200 taps
in four different sugar bushes plus
roadside trees. The roadside trees
were good, he says, because they got
plenty of sunlight and had little
competition from other trees and thus
produced sweeter sap. He would run
plastic tubing from several trees to a
collection barrel. He had a bulk tank
with a suction pump on it and that
would quickly empty the barrels. In
all he had about 75 barrels in
operation.
In 1973 change was forced on the
Thomases when their land was taken
over for a dam project on the Grand
River. They moved north to
Egremont Twp. in Grey County
where they had a much better 200 -
acre farm, Harry says. And of course
there was a sugar bush. They stayed
there for 17 years before "retiring" to
their current home..
In more than 50 years in the
business he's seen many changes. He
never made syrup in the open but he
can recall when some people made
syrup in black iron and even
galvanized pans. Today all pans must
be made of stainless steel and use of
lead solder is discouraged because of
worries of lead getting into the syrup.
The picturesque image of a horse-
drawn sleigh has long since
disappeared from virtually all sugar
bushes, of course. Harry began using
plastic tubing in 1959 and by the
mid -sixties his sap buckets were
sitting unused.
In the early 1960s he started using
a vacuum pump to draw the sap
through the lines to the storage tank.
"I think the vacuum pump was the
biggest advance in the syrup
business," he says. With a gravity -fed
tubing system things worked
relatively well when the sap was
flowing well but if it wasn't, the sap
would sit stagnant in the lines. As
well, if a hole develops in the line
(and squirrels can cause problems)
the sap will leak out in a gravity
system. With a vacuum pump, air
Harry and Ruth Thomas (above) enjoy retirement in their log home built of Grey
County red pine. The home and sugar shack (below) nestle beside a maple bush
on the couple's 98 -acre farm near Priceville.
will be sucked into the pipeline
instead. There are only problems if
you get so many holes you lose
pressure in the lines.
Back the late 1940s Harry began
using oil as a healing source. He had
to build his own oil burner because
equipment manufacturers didn't have
that equipment in those days. He
burned used oil which he picked up
from garages (they'd often pay him
to take it away). He used the system
for more than 20 years but the cost of
oil went up and it became less
economical. Now, he chuckled, he's
going backward with a wood -fired
evaporator. Wood, he says, has its
advantages including improving the
lifespan of the evaporator pan. It
gives a more even heat without the
hot spots that an oil fire seemed to
provide.
Evaporators have changed
tremendously too. Some producers
are using reverse osmosis machines
to take the water out of the sap,
machines that can cost up to S30,000,
he says. Others are using piggy -hack
pans in which a second pan is placed
above the main evaporator pan. This
MARCH 1996 19