Taps are out, celebration soon
This Week at the Sugarbush
As expected, Tuesday turned out to be our last boil. We only got 7 gallons of syrup, so the boil went pretty quickly. I spent the rest of the day pulling the taps and starting to pack up the boil site.
One question we get sometimes is whether we plug up the holes at the end of the season. It's actually fairly important NOT to plug the holes. Trees are able to heal tapping holes pretty easily over the course of 6-12 months. The cambium layer of the tree grows over the wound and seals it shut. But when newbie tappers or well-meaning bystanders try to plug a hole, it traps bacteria inside the tree and blocks the cambium layer from closing. It's sort of like giving the tree a splinter, and trees don't have any way to get that splinter out. So while it might seem a little counter intuitive to leave sap leaking out at the end of the season, it's actually what's best for the tree.
Once the taps were pulled, we did our last round of finishing and canning. We ended up just shy of 6 gallons of total syrup. (We also accidentally made about half a cup of crystalized maple sugar when we overshot our target sugar % in a few of the jars. We're still trying to figure out how get it out of the jar safely, so if you have any tips, let me know. )
We had 36 volunteers this year, who put in a total of nearly 400 hours! This gives us ratio of about 4.2 hours worked for every cup of syrup produced. We might not be a model of capitalist efficiency, but luckily we're something much better 😊
From here, we'll be packing up the rest of the equipment and getting ready for our End-of-Season Celebration on April 19th at 1pm. We'll be serving acorn pancakes with this season's maple syrup, free for this years' sugarbush volunteers and with a $5-$10 suggested donation for everyone else. Volunteers will be able to pick up their syrup shares, as well as a hand-printed Montague Commoners tshirt to thank them for their help in making this year such a success.
Coming Up Next Week
Tuesday is a day with multiple city and township board meetings:
- Whitehall City Council at 5pm
- Montague Township Board at 7pm
- Grant Township Board at 7:30pm
Friday we'll be doing our usual Dance For Democracy at the Weathervane at noon. Following requests at the one this week, I'm going to try to put together some songbooks before this Friday so that folks can start singing along.
The rest of the week, I'll be packing up the sugarbush supplies and cleaning up the camp ground, as well as catching up on some sleep and house cleaning.
In the Broader Movement
Millions of people around the country came together on Saturday for the Hands Off protests against the ongoing destruction of our democracy. I was at the rally in Muskegon, where the crowd was 3,000-5,000 strong! It gave me a chance to hand out a ton of the stickers we cut out in February. The energy in the crowd was really good (even when some of the politicians inevitably talked too long 😩) and it's great to see how organized Rank MI Vote is getting. (More on that in the next section.) Mass protest movements are most effective when they can bring people together in a common cause and then give them concrete steps to take to advance that cause, and I think Muskegon Engaged did a fantastic job with that this weekend. (More on them in Recommendation Corner)
Solidarity Steps
Have you gotten the chance to nerd out on ranked choice voting yet? If not, you are in for a treat. Ranked choice voting is a system that makes third party candidates actually viable, by eliminating the need for strategic voting. It's a little complicated, so I'll leave the explaining to the sources I'm linking to in this section. The important part that I want to pass along is that we've got a real chance at adopting ranked choice voting in Michigan this year, and it would be a big step in fixing what's gone wrong with our political system.
I just signed up for Rank MI Vote, and I highly recommend checking them out. I was extremely impressed by their turnout at the Muskegon rally, and I think they've got a real shot at making change. The conditions are better right now for a ranked choice voting push than I've seen them in a long time. It's going to take a petition drive to get it on the ballot, and then a voter education drive to explain the initiative to people who (inexplicably) don't spend their weekends researching alternative voting systems. But I really think we could do it, and I'm excited to see how it develops.
They're going to be holding an informational event at White Lake Community Library on May 17th. It'll be a great opportunity to meet the folks working on it locally and figure out how you can best get involved.
Recommendation Corner
There is now a local activism podcast! Maggie and Emily from Muskegon Engaged are local organizers in Muskegon, and they're putting together a podcast covering local protests and community meetings, as well as state and national politics. They've done two episodes so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where they take it from here.
Also in Recommendation Corner this week, because there's no rule saying there can't be two things in one corner, is the newly published "How to Talk to Your Son about Fascism" by Craig A. Johnson. It's a short and accessible guide to how fascist movements recruit young men, and what parents can do about it. Unfortunately, it's a short and accessible guide published by an academic publisher, which means this 150 page book costs thirty freaking dollars. (It's currently on sale from the publisher for $20) I've got a couple of extra copies to lend, and I bet the local libraries could get it if we bugged them a little. I emailed the publisher about buying some copies in bulk, because I think this is an important one to be able to spread around.
This Week's Nails
You made it to the end of the newsletter! It was another long one this week. Make sure you stretch and drink some water before you go on to your next desk thing. I took a break from the swatching project this week because I wanted to play around with some new polishes I got this month. I keep telling myself that I couldn't possibly need any more nail polish, but then some DIYer somewhere finds a new combination of sparkles and I just can't resist. 😂 My teenage self would be extremely disappointed to see 99% of the world of the world we're living in, but they would be incredibly excited by the endless variety of the indie nail polish world. At least if we're headed into another supply chain crisis, we'll have a local community sparkle reserve.
