The sweet mysteries of spring ~ March 23, 1995

by David Heiller

The mystery of spring has struck, and all the explanations in the world won’t stop me from gawking.

Sweet, sweet mystery of Spring!

Take those maple trees. We drilled 43 holes and hammered in aluminum taps on March 11, right at the start of a warm spell.

Eighteen inches of snow carpeted the woods that Saturday, and three days later, the carpet was threadbare.

That in itself mystified a lot of people. It was the talk of the town. “What happened to the snow? How could so much snow disappear so fast?”

But maple trees offer a bigger mystery. You’d think when the warm weather hit, the sap would have flowed fast and filled our buckets. That didn’t happen. The sap didn’t run at all during that warm spell, when it was 60 during the day and 40 at night.

Jim Sales, a friend from Askov who used to tend the maple trees at Audubon Center of the North Woods in Sandstone, told me why: the trees need cold nights to go with the warm days.

The cold nights tell the maple trees to pull their sap into their roots to protect themselves. Then during the warm days, the sap rises, and if you have a tap in the tree, some of it drips out into a bucket.

I had read about Jim’s explanation before. I knew the “what,” that nights below freezing and days above freezing meant that sap flowed well. But I didn’t know the “why,” and I will try to forget it as soon as possible. The simple mystery of flowing sap is enough to make me marvel at life returning to the North Country.

I marvel even more as 40 gallons of sap are boiled down into one utterly delicious gallon of syrup. That’s another mystery of nature. How is this possible? Who the heck discovered it? How did they stumble upon such a lucky find?

Planting the year before.
 Good parsnips take almost a year!

PARSNIPS offer another mystery to me. We planted a bed of them last spring, and weeded and thinned them, then left them in the garden over the winter. Alvin Jensen of Askov says this gives them a sweeter taste.

I dug half a dozen out on Sunday, washed and peeled them, sliced them in a pan and fried them in butter. They were delicious. My wife said they tasted good enough to eat like breakfast cereal, with milk in a bowl. Some people like to sprinkle brown sugar on them, to make them even sweeter.

But why hadn’t they frozen, like everything else in the garden? They weren’t even mulched. And why are they better in the spring than they are in the fall?

HONEYBEES offer another mystery to me. They are flying in this warm weather, looking for food, cleaning out their hives. They survived 30-below-zero nights by huddling in a ball 20,000 strong. At the center of the ball is a queen, who mated one time and has 200,000 eggs to show for it.

She lays those eggs, they develop into larva, the larva turn into bees, the bees collect nectar and ingest it and expel it and fan their wings and the next thing you know, there’s a hive full of honey. Something that mankind, for all his explanations and knowledge, cannot make.

Don’t answer the whys in this column. Sometimes its better just to marvel at nature. Be thankful for the sweet things in life, like maple syrup and parsnips and honey bees.