Sippican Cottage reports sad news from Maine…

Skowhegan Maple Fest 2015

The Maple Festival is supposed to celebrate the culmination of sugaring season in Maine. There’s a problem.

There is no sugaring season in Maine, and there might not be one this year to speak of. During the Maple Festivals, the sugar houses of small to medium-sized maple syrup producers open their doors for a pseudo-open-house look at how they make syrup, and to sell their wares to the public. There are no wares this year because there is no sugar. In order to get the maple sap that gets boiled endlessly down into syrup, the temperature has to rise above 32 degrees Farenheit for more than ten minutes at a time, and it hasn’t done so. The temperature at my house was below zero last night, and the temperature has been 5-10 degrees below normal every month for two years. I’ve read that sugar houses are opening up for the Maple Festival and simply boiling water from the tap to show people what maple sugar season would look like if we had one, which we don’t.

Robert Heinlein wrote (thirty years ago) about the likely-hood that when things started getting colder in Europe centuries ago they piled on the wood and coal and staved off another mini ice-age.   Today the EPA is seriously attempting to ban burning all wood and coal.  We’ll miss the maple sugar in the morning on our pancakes when it’s gone.