The advent of autumn has always been bittersweet as the seasonal burst of a multifaceted patina of foliage is counterbalanced by the sad brown and gray death of its aftermath. I was in between these worlds this weekend as the first of a weekly raking regime started. I’ve always enjoyed raking as it is a good way to get some exercise as well as reflect on the gardens of my past and the ones I could build in the future.
The current task was both easier and harder than in prior years. Easier as the number of leaves were fewer due to the many trees I had removed last year in advance of a new septic system. Harder in that my successful experimentation with a low-grow, no-mow lawn gave me a thick bed of fescue and clover that coveted every leaf that sat upon it as if they did not want that blanket to be removed. The last sheet was the hardest to separate from their grasps.
This vigor stirred up not only sweat from me but the smells of the season. Fresh soil that became exposed had a simple, fresh aroma. Dead grass that was liberated from the mass by the tines of the rake was sweet and sour like a favorite Chinese take-out dish. The leaves had little fragrance yet as their liberation was fresh and decomposition in the early stages. But in few weeks they will have a distinctively pungent sour smell.
These are all expected and welcome aromas like that of an old friend you come to visit every year. But there was a new fragrance added to the mix that was completely unexpected.
As I mentioned in my last post, a large leader from a sugar maple snapped barely missing my house. My arborist came by quickly cutting up the larger limbs and trunk of the tree into stove-sized sections while grinding up the rest. I not only kept large logs but also the resulting chips, that were violently regurgitated from a chute after being fed into an interlocking set of toothy rollers that tore though six-inch logs and branches without a thought. I was left with a cord and a half of wood, four yards or so of chips and a stump with 103 rings of age.
The pile of chips is a wonderful byproduct of the tree’s demise as I was about to go out and purchase loads of them to replenish beds and pathways around my gardens. As I put the first shovel into the pile, a tiny wisp of smoke emerged. Then with the next poke a much larger one and the smell of apple cider. The pile, as you dug deeper, was increasingly warm to the touch and with each layer disturbed smelled as would a tub of freshly crushed apples.
This isn’t the first time I associated food with a sugar maple on my property. About 5 years ago, we had some limbs from two sugar maples removed after a winter storm had damaged it and other trees. Toward the end of winter we noticed all the cuts off the maples were bleeding sap and figured out we had inadvertently tapped the trees. Never one to miss an opportunity we started to collect the sap and tried to boil it down on our wood stove dreaming of buckets of delicious maple syrup that would complement our traditional Sunday morning pancakes.
Every day for weeks we would collect a quart or two of sap and put it on the stove to boil down not realizing at the time that for every gallon of thick, dark maple syrup it takes up to 40 gallons of thin, transparent sap to produce it; at the end we got a little less than a half a pint. But it didn’t matter as the process made the house smell sweet, very much like the pile of chips next to my fence.
So with each shovel came a spurt of sweetness. When I emptied a wheelbarrow’s worth of chips came another. For a while I forgot about the leaves and other parts of the fall preferring to focus on this unexpected harvest and experience it for the rest of the day.
