This story originally was going to be about the sugaring season in Northern New England in general. It quickly turned into a story about maple sap buckets and the sap line that is replacing them. This happened for a couple of reasons, one being that it fit nicely into a series of stories that I’ve been working on about the changing face of New England. I also felt that concentrating on the sap bucket vs. sap line story line would more interesting and more fun to do.

I got all of my "homework" for this story done about a month before the season started. I picked up some brochures on maple producers and found more information about sugarhouses on the interenet, then started planning which of these sugarhouses I would contact. After contacting a few people, everything was in place, set-up, done and ready to go, then Mother Nature failed to cooperate. The freezing daytime temperatures of winter would not break once time for sugaring season came, preventing the sap from flowing. I kept calling the farmers to make sure they knew I still wanted to get pictures, and out of fear that with the passage of time they would forget about our arrangement.

When sugaring season finally did start, I was rewarded with a great day at the Green’s farm in Poultney, Vermont. The weather was perfect, nothing but blue skies and a temperature that was perfect for sap flow. Much of the time I was there I traveled around with Russell Green. He gave me a lot background about sugaring on the Green’s farm and showed me some interesting places there, in particular the old sugarhouse. Eventually the weather got too nice, getting so warm by the time noon rolled around that the sap stopped flowing. Unfortunately this was an omen of things to come.

From the day at the Greens until well into the sugaring season, the weather continued to get too warm for good sap flow during the days. This effected the quality of the sap, if it was running at all. The maple farmers that I spoke with all said that the season would have been a huge letdown if, during what became the last week of sugaring season, it hadn’t become cooler during the days. Doug Bragg said that he was able to produce some excellent syrup during this last week and turn a poor season into an average one.

I discussed the use of sap lines somewhat extensively in the story, but only used a couple of photos of them. I was very happy with the two photos that I used and to be in the right position to get them, using more would have been repetitive. Sap buckets were really the star of the show photographically, the sap line just doesn’t have the charisma that the buckets do. In my mind, it was much more interesting to read about sap line than to look at it, thus it was discussed at depth in the story.

I went to the Cate’s log sugarhouse with the intent of getting a night shot of the outside of it while the Cates were boiling sap. The only problem with doing this was that by the time the sap started to flow, the full moon that I had hoped for had turned to no moon. I knew that many farmers were about ready to end the season because of the problems already mentioned, so I went ahead with the shoot. I don’t do a great deal of night photography, therefore I didn’t have a lot of personal knowledge to draw on while doing this shoot. Quite simply, the night photos didn’t work. There just wasn’t enough available light to get the effect that I wanted.

The shoot was anything but a total loss. The interior of the Cates sugarhouse had a look that I liked and the photos that I used from there portray the cozy, log walled atmosphere of it. I rarely use flash these days, preferring the look of natural light, but in case I decided some was needed. I wanted more depth of field than I could get with available light while hand holding the camera, so out came the flash. I bounced it off the wall, aimed just a little bit behind me and tilted upward so that the light would bounce all around the room, giving the photo a softly lit feel.

The most unique photos to come from this story were of the walls of buckets being washed at the Bragg Farm. The version with the old dairy barn in the background was a far better shot than I planned on. Coming away with either of the two shots shown in the outtakes, especially the one with dandelions in the foreground, would have made me very happy. The photo with the dairy barn just had the extra element that made the shot perfect. Getting all three of those shots was the direct result of being inquisitive. During an earlier visit to the Bragg Farm I had a conversation with Doug Bragg and in the course of that conversation asked him how and when they clean the buckets. After he told about the procedure I asked him to call me before they started cleaning them this year. A conversation after shooting the bucket washing photos led me to yet another interesting place.

Doug Bragg told me that the sap buckets used on his farm are made in Vermont at the G.H. Grimm company in Rutland. I had planned to end the photo coverage for this story that day, but going to Grimm’s could be a way to add some extra dimension to the story. I found the contact information for them and then set up a visit to the factory and a short interview. I expected a fairly modern looking building that would look like countless other factories across the region. It turned out that my expectations were wrong. The plant is located inside a century old building; the part of the factory where the buckets are made has big wooden floorboards, big old machines and the look and feel of another era to it. I felt this was an excellent way to end a story about a way of sugaring that has the same feel to it.