Tell me if this story sounds familiar: when the pandemic started, at first you wondered how long it would last. But after the first couple months it became clear that you should settle in for the long haul and make the best of a bad situation.
For me, that meant homesteading. I looked around at our acres of underutilized land, and I saw an opportunity to finally try things I had always wanted to but never had, due to travel and outside commitments. I know I’m not the only one who took on chickens as a pandemic project. Tomatoes and raspberries too. But the big one, for me, was making my own maple syrup.
I spent the first pandemic winter scheming and preparing, but the random YouTube videos I watched for instruction let me down. I bought all the wrong equipment. Come spring, half my taps produced no sap at all. I tried to evaporate the syrup in a stockpot outside, over an open fire; it filled with ash and took days to cook down. The final product was a thin, brown, semisweet fluid that my neighbors pretended to enjoy. The whole thing was a disaster.
I vowed to do better next season. I needed to learn from experts, so I enrolled in an online class offered by the Cornell Cooperative Extension. The instructor was Adam Wild, who runs the Uihlein Maple Research Forest just outside Lake Placid, and dozens of students attended from all over North America: a guy on Vancouver Island on the West Coast, a woman who had just “married into” a forest in Quebec with thousands of taps, and me, two acres and 40 trees on a little homestead in New York.
It was a classic pandemic experience, 18 hours of Zoom over six weeks. And the class worked. The next spring I made amazing syrup that I now enjoy every morning in my steel-cut oats.
But along the way I learned more than I about food and the land, the meaning we make, doesn’t always square with the realities of how we have to about it.
