Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 May 1875 — Forest Sugar. [ARTICLE]

Forest Sugar.

Care of the forests still remaining as well as the planting of new ones will “ pay” for sugar-producing purposes. | The sap of several varieties of trees is rich in saccharine matter. That of the hickory is literally as thick and sweet as honey, and is even more crystalline in its transparency; the quantity yielded is»so small that it has not been found profitable. These qualities of its sap may indicate that the tree is worth a careful series of scientific and practical experiments to ascertain what can be developed from it in this direction. The king of the forest sugar-producing trees is the hard maple, acer saccharinium. Sugar-making from this tree is already an industry of great magnitude, and is capable of almost indefinite expansion. It is highly remunerative. It is also a tree which stands in the front rank in respect to landscape and to climate culture, as well as for fuel and for use in the mechanic arts. Improved methods of care and of propagation of the trees and of processes of sugar-making are destined to show that the sugar maple is susceptible of very great increase of profit from a given expenditure. First, however, we must resolutely and intelligently set ourselves about a decidedly wholesale increase of the number of these trees. Much more care is need to be taken of the maple saplings and of those not yet large enough to tap. There arq tens of thousands of only m the New England and the Middle, but in the Western and the Southern States, on each of winch, at an insignificant expense, a few thousand maple seeds could be profitably planted. Posterity may not have done much for us, but on many of these farms there are stony; tree-stripped, ten-acre lots, not worth ten dollars an acre, which would be worth fifty dollars an acre in ten years after a thorough seed-planting with good hard maple and other tree seeds. A liberal sprinkling of oak and hickory would provide for profitable thinning out for hoop-poles, leaving abundance of maples in each case for a sugar orchard. The cost of each seed-planting properly managed would be substantially nothing. A few hours would be spent by a bright boy or girl collecting acorns and hickory nuts, and seeds from some maple tree famous for its beauty and for its sugar-bearing qualities; and a few half days and “ odd spells” spent in tucking them into the ground, and the thing is done. If the owner of such a. ten-acre lot has to spend a few dollars even to buy the seed, and ten dollars more to hire a skillful nurseryman to help him put the seed in the ground to the beet advantage, he will still have an investment which will yield a large profit in bis own generation. The advance in the cash value of his property consequent to thus beautifying the same is much for him in his day, irrespective of posterity. Mapielrees'will of course grow more slowly on a poor soil than on a rich one; but'the timber will be of finer grain, and the sap, though less in quantity, Will be richer in saccharine matter. Trees may be tapped to advantage standing as thick as 200 per acre, but where ground is plenty they had better' be thinned out to fifty. The records of the amount of sap yield per tree, of the quantity of sugar or sirup from a given number of gallons,of sap from various sized trees, are so conflicting as to make it hardly possible to strike general average. Carelessness in tapping trees and collecting sap, the crude appliances for sugar-making, the unscientific way of doing the work, especially in its last stages, doubtless very largely reduce the results. Some report as low an average as a pound as the yiejd of a season of sugar per tree; others from ten to twelve pounds. One case of a grove in Vermont of eighty trees, covering several acres, seems to come well authenticated, in which the yield was 100 pounds per day during the season of from three to four weeks. These trees were thrifty, the trunks were from two apd a half to three feet in diameter and the work of tapping, saving, collecting and evaporating the sap was done thoroughly and skillfully. President Marsh, in his invaluable work, “ Man %nd Nature,” page 170, edition of 1871, cites a case where a tree in New England yielded forty-two and a half pounds of wet sugar in a season; nineteen pounds of wet sugar is calculated to drain off three p»unds of sirup, leaving sixteen fiounds of dry sugar; three galontf of sap will make a pound of wet sugar, and twenty gallons of sap is given by some as the average yield per season, per tree; though a case is cited from Warner, N. H., where a single tree yielded twenty gallons of sap per day. I have no doubt that a grove can be made to yield from half a ton to a ton and a half per acre by scientific treatment of the soil and of propagation of the original stock. After years ot painstaking by the best sugar-growers of France and Germany had secured a ratio of ten pounds pf sugar from 100 pounds of beets, Louis Vilmorin so perfected his processes of culture and manufacture as to secure twenty-one pounds. The maplesugar industry is well worthy of an equally patient and elaborate series of experiments. —From a paper read before the American Institute;New York City, by Geo. May Powell. ■ > —The author of "When; this old hat was new” was unquestionably a verse-a-tile genius.