The Quiet Harvest

Leasing 1900+ trees to a maple sugar maker

When we secured my childhood forest a year ago, we knew we wanted it to be part of the working rural landscape of Vermont. We wanted to conserve the High Wood, and part of conserving it meant not letting it become an overgrown bramble; it would need to be tended and it would need to be tended by more people than just me and my wife.

Forests are like gardens: if they are left to their own devices, they will become a terrible tangle of briar, nettle, and saplings of undesirable species. Striped maple, for instance, will grow like a weed to a height of twenty feet before falling unceremoniously over onto a logging or access road.

As much as I romanticize trees, some species must be culled.

“Sleeping Beauty” by Trina Schart Hyman, a proper representation of what our forest looked like when we purchased it

A tangled forest is not good for human recreation as it obviously makes it impassable, but the detriments also affect wildlife. The wild animals of Vermont — the deer, turkey, partridge, and others — do not thrive in dense forests and overgrowth. Instead, they prefer the places where meadows and woods meet, the liminal spaces of forest and field. Who can blame them? A meadow clearing in the middle of a maple wood may be the most inviting place on this good green earth. It evokes Arthurian legends or Tolkien and the shimmer leaf-light of the forest edge allows for a higher level of contemplation.

The Irish author Frank Frankfort Moore stated, “I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day,” but I contend it would be in a meadow at the forest’s edge draped in the golden green of bough-dappled light.

Our forest management plan did not call for a timber harvest within the next ten years, however. That really left one viable option for a project that would allow us to meet our goal of activating the forest as part of Vermont’s working rural landscape while conserving it.

Agriculture.

Engaging in some form of agriculture in the High Wood presented a few options. The most complex by far would be some form of silvopasture where one keeps livestock in the forest. The overhead investment of both time and money was insurmountable, however. Clearing pasture in the High Wood, purchasing stock animals, building some kind of barn, etc. was just too much and frankly our coffers were drained from purchasing both the High Wood and our little cottage nearby.

Animal husbandry is not the only form of agriculture, however. Maple sugaring is integral to the history of Vermont, and our county is allegedly the “planetary epicenter” of sugar maples. Our neighbors had been leasing their forest adjacent to ours for years to a fifth generation maple sugar maker. He would tap the trees and run lines down to a shack where the sap would be collected and then transported by truck to his sugar house nearby where it would be boiled into sweet maple syrup. Long gone are the days of thousands of metal pales hanging from the trees of Vermont.

Contemporary tapping

I encouraged my neighbors to give him my number and to reach out so we could discuss expanding his operation into our woods.

When he called, an extraordinary and unexpected benefit became apparent…