When it comes to non-native and invasive species, though, I’ve always turned a blind eye. I know there’s a lot of bad stuff out there, but removal often seems like a huge undertaking, both beyond my budget and often beyond my physical capabilities. And frankly, it’s depressing. My mental piggy bank is stuffed to capacity with environmental problems, and so I worry about the invasives growing on someone else’s woodlot in the same way one might worry about someone else’s children. The empathy and compassion are there, but there’s none of the urgency a parent feels.

All of this changed for me the other day when I saw the bamboo-like shoots of Japanese knotweed – a prolific, crazy-fast growing invasive – encroaching on some beloved Vermont wildflowers near my home. On an evening walk, I stopped by a little creek I’ve long-admired for its clear waters and banks crowded with purple trillium, trout lily, wild ginger, and small-flowered forget-me-nots. My heart sank when I saw the purplish-green stalks of Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) coming up, just a few feet from patches of native wildflowers. In a few years, maybe sooner, the knotweed will undoubtedly take over this patch of land by this little creek, putting an end to the growth of wildflowers. That knotweed may decrease water quality and cause massive soil erosion is bad news in the way that our country being $14 trillion in debt is bad news; that the plant is taking my trillium away feels like someone’s stealing my wallet.

Beyond hand-pulling juvenile plants (including their roots), there’s not much I alone can do to effectively rid the area of knotweed, which has massive underground root systems. But there is another way I can tackle this beast of plant, if only symbolically: I can eat it.

Japanese knotweed has a rhubarb-like consistency and a tangy, earthy flavor. The bamboo-like shoots are what you eat, not the leaves. And now is the time to eat it, when the shoots are still young and tender. Once knotweed begins to branch out and grow beyond a foot or two high, it becomes fibrous and woody – not at all pleasant for eating. So if you’re into foraging this plant, make haste: knotweed can grow more than an inch each day, quickly becoming inedible.

While eating knotweed may not be the best way to remove it from the environment (after all, those roots are still intact), there are those who believe that if you keep picking the shoots each year, the rhizome mass beneath the earth will deplete itself of the resources needed to send up new shoots. And until I find another 20 hours in my week to hand-pick the plants (or some money to pay the local invasive species removal team), I’m going to encourage eating it.

Last night, after harvesting a shopping bag-full of stalks, I made Japanese knotweed and strawberry crisp, based on a recipe from The Foraging Family, with a few changes. Here’s my version of that site’s great recipe:

Knotweed and Strawberry Crisp

3 cups frozen strawberries. If whole, let strawberries soften so you can slice them.
1 cup Japanese knotweed (rinsed), cut into ½-1 inch pieces
2 Tbl sugar
½ cup flour
½ cup whole oats
½ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup salted butter
Pinch of each: baking soda, baking powder, and salt
1 tsp cinnamon (more to taste)

• Preheat oven to 350° F.
• Mix softened (not completely thawed) strawberries and chopped knotweed in bowl with 2 Tbl sugar.
• In separate bowl, mix flour, oats, brown sugar, baking soda and powder, salt, and cinnamon.
• Cut butter into oat and flour mixture, and use fingers to crumble it into dry mixture.
• Spread ½ of that mixture on bottom of ceramic pie plate (or grease a 9” x 9” pan), add strawberry-knotweed mixture, then sprinkle on remaining crumble topping.
• Bake 40 minutes, or until crumble topping is browned.
• Eat, knowing you are taking one small step in the battle against the wildflower-crushing invasive, Japanese knotweed.

If only we could sprinkle cinnamon on all of life’s problems and eat them.

You can read the bill yourself, and perhaps, like me, you’ll decide that you object to it just because you don’t understand much of anything that’s being said. You’ll understand what each of the individual words means, you just won’t understand the implications of the sentences because the language is largely meaningless to anyone who doesn’t speak politician.

For instance; will the bill really open up roadless areas? As near as I can tell, the answer hinges on this line: [Wilderness areas should be managed] in a manner that supports and facilitates recreational fishing, hunting, and shooting opportunities. Does “facilitate” mean open to vehicles? Or does it just mean keep open to hunting, fishing, and shooting? I have no idea.

As to the lead shot/sinker rollback, if you trace the arcane language in this bill back to section 3(2)(B) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (15 U.S.C. 2602(2)(B)) you will learn that what’s being proposed is that lead ammo and fishing tackle get removed from Environmental Protection Agency jurisdiction. What I don’t know is how this law, if passed, would affect local ordinances. (Maine, New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire all have their own get-out-the-lead laws on the books.)

Otherwise, the bill would protect recreational shooting at National Monument sites (here’s a complete list of national monuments for your perusal), though I’m not sure if this would allow someone to fulfill a lifelong dream of shooting skeet off the edge of Devil’s Tower, or if local no-skeet ordinances would trump this.

The bill would also make it legal to import a polar bear trophy that was shot legally pre-1997, and hunt deer with dogs in Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana. Personally, I’m fine with both of these things, but as a sportsman, neither really strike me as doing anything important to preserve my hunting and fishing heritage, which does leave me feeling a bit overlooked (besides feeling confused).

Anyway, what do you think? Since so many of our readers are environmentalists and sportsmen, I’m sure there are many of you with an opinion.

Will the bill pass the senate and get signed into law? I’m told by a source I trust that it has about a 4% chance of being enacted, and that it’s really more about election year politics than anything real. It’ll give incumbent politicians the ability to say “I supported sportsman’s heritage!” And special interest groups ammo to tar those who didn’t as anti-sportsman.

This, unfortunately, I understand all too well.

I immediately contacted friend and photographer Hi-ya Ki-ya, and soon we were both sitting around the base of the tree, necks craning like two primitives worshiping at the alter of an all-powerful pagan tree-God. A deep booming voice demanded an offering of nitrogen and potassium. I think it was just Hi-ya messing around, but I was in such a weird mental place that my first thought was, “how the hell am I going to find potassium on a Sunday?”

Anyway, the sculpture sits about 40 feet up in the air and seems to be based on Edvard Munch’s classic painting, “The Scream.” As far as homages go, the work is top notch. Rather than rest at simple imitation, this masterpiece evolves the scream concept. Whereas Munch’s screamer had a head like a light bulb, this one has a head like a tree; also, Munch’s rainbow-swirl background was fixed, while this background changes every minute, lending the piece a never-get-stale feel. I also appreciate the artist’s decision to forgo the hands-on-cheeks body language in favor of an arm’s skyward, Halloweeney, “Muwah-ha-ha” pose. It’s much scarier.

As we were sitting there, the sculptor paid his work a visit. He was a short fellow, distinguishable by a smart black tuxedo and a shocking, bright red Mohawk. I yelled to him that Adelaide Tyrol was accepting Outdoor Palette submissions and that his work would be a welcome addition to Northern Woodlands, but all I got were cacophonous squawkings and a raised tail-feather gesture that was both rude and vaguely obscene. As we pondered a deeper meaning, the artist let fly a sluice of glowing white urates all down the front of his masterpiece, a disturbing move that made artist Andres Serrano’s infamous urination submersions of the late 1980s seem tame in comparison.

“Artists,” said Hiya. “They’re such strange birds.” (Though he’d later retract this statement and apologize for sounding judgmental, pointing out that if your surname was Dryocopus and your old man had named you Pileatus, you probably would have grown up to be an eccentric artist, too. Truth be told, they’ve made great strides in the Vermont school system where it comes to name-related bullying – this observation from someone who still remembers the sting of prissy little Penelope Jones’ perversion of my relatively simple surname, an act she accomplished by rubbing the tips of her two index fingers together to simulate kissing while rhetorically wondering if my middle name was “Ro;” this at 11, at a time in a boy’s life when girls and kissing and romance are about as embarrassing as your mother spitting on a napkin and wiping food off your face in public – but in any case, you get the point from this way-too-long segue that in a rural place with a limited ethnic population any name, let alone such a bizarre one, can be hard on a kid and so who are we to judge how anyone turns out.)

When the artist’s unabashed feculence made it apparent that he was way too edgy for our family publication, I immediately morphed into curator mode. Some quick math proved that if, as expected, Munch’s “The Scream” fetches $80 million at auction (an auction being held May 2 in New York City), and this piece is worth half that (a conservative estimate, I’d say), and I was able to secure a 40 percent commission on a sale (we do own the gallery, after all), it would take me about 533,333 years to generate that same kind of money by tapping the tree. When it comes to the question of to tap or not to tap a hard maple, I tend to think landowners overvalue their trees as sawlogs and undervalue them as part of a working sugaring operation, but this is clearly not a case where tapping produces the highest financial return on a tree.

So, I’m having a private art sale. And while I could justify plugging it in more detail in this blog on account of the fact that I’ll undoubtedly donate a substantial portion of the take to the Center for Northern Woodlands Education, it’s still a bit of a conflict of interest. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, I’d like to ask any of you out there who have similar oddities in your woods – trees that look like paintings, or boulders that look like your uncle Henry, or whatever you got – to take a picture and send it to us. It would be fun to put together a quirky photo essay of woodland curios like this and run it in a future issue of the magazine. Pictures can be sent to our assistant editor, Meghan Oliver.

I am, at the moment, in Amherst, Massachusetts, at the New England Society of American Foresters’ conference that's being held on the UMASS campus. If you've never been here – and I hadn't been before Tuesday – it's really quite a place. It's sort of its own little city, or maybe, it's own little organism. You drive up through a relatively rural area that features flat farm fields and down-homey small businesses, then suddenly high-rises sprout up out of nowhere and you drive onto an island of life where everything's fast paced and frenetic. Cars whizzing by in every direction. More signs than the eye can comprehend. The metropolis features architectural styles that range from cute and quaint to soviet Russia. The marching band has its own building.

The hotel where I'm staying is 11 floors tall and sits above the student center, which is also where the conference is being held. You park in a parking garage and then walk into the belly of an enormous concrete building – circa 1970 – with big, precast, rib-like cement trusses on the ceiling and exposed factory style ductwork. The doorway leading into the restroom is 4 feet wide and 8 inches thick. There's so much concrete you feel like you're in a bunker or a tomb.

And I know I'm going on way too long about the architecture, but it's surreal to be attending a forestry conference in a building where the only thing made of wood is the paper the schedule is printed on and it seems worth setting the scene. Especially because the juxtaposition is poignant. Here we are, a whole basement full of people whose lives revolve around the woods and nature, talking about how to better communicate with the public about forest health issues, and land conservation issues, and the buy local wood movement, while upstairs the general public is buzzing around the urban-styled campus center, buying pizza, and signing Occupy petitions, and discussing fashion and sports and all matter of things that don't involve nature or the woods. The moment seems ripe with opportunity and at the same time a touch overwhelming and daunting.

There is a whole host of things to report on here, but I'm on a hotel lobby computer and I have 9:13 seconds before my time expires; plus I'm late for a presentation on foliar diseases in white pine. I will say, though, that as a writer/editor it's very refreshing to be around so many science-minded people. Nobody here will give you a straight answer about anything, which I love. Bring up a problem – say the miserable economic climate for forest products – and someone might point out that a silver lining in all this is that the poor markets in his/her area have led to less high grading, and because the junk wood is nearly as valuable as the good stuff, it's finally being cut. Bring up the extensive damage caused by an insect pest like the hemlock woolley adelgid and someone might point out that dead hemlocks in his/her area are accelerating forest succession, leading to old growth characteristics in young forest (and a host of complementary new animals). When the hemlock snags burn, as some are now, the forest is reverting to the original oak forest. And it's too early to say how everything will play out:  on sites that are perfectly suited to growing hemlock, there are residual populations of healthy trees that seem to be fighting the adelgid and winning.

I've found that pretty much any forester will argue the opposite side of any observation you want to make about the woods, any trend you want to report as truth. And it's great in my business to have people constantly reminding you that ecology is fluid. The woods are constantly changing. When it comes to forest health there's a back story to consider, and a future to consider, and there's really never an “a-ha” moment anywhere, just a bunch of little hunches, some things that seem to work, some things that don’t, lots of "this is what the research shows, but . . ."

The computer's flashing and saying that I have less than :30 to logoff. More on this soon.

It’s easy for people in this business, myself included, to rail against theater that masquerades as journalism, but this instinct is not very productive. Like it or not, traditional media has taken a backseat to YouTube videos, blogs, and podcasts. Today, everyone with a cell phone and internet connection is a journalist – that’s just the world we live in.

But while it’s pointless to fight it, it is worth stressing the fact, whenever possible, that news and information that comes from advocates with a vested interest is not true journalism. It’s propaganda. Even if it supports a cause we believe in. And it’s in everyone’s best interest to recognize this distinction.

A good litmus test for this is currently unfolding as global warming activists take the news of a poor sugaring season and run with it, blurring the lines between weather and climate, turning sugarmakers into polar bears, making complicated issues simple to suit the (albeit well-intentioned) narrative they’re promoting. In the last few weeks, I’ve read separate news stories that have told me that sugar content is lower today than it was in the 1950s due to stressed maple trees, that the sugaring season comes 11.4 days earlier than it used to, and that in recent years sap has been off flavor because of tree stress.

None of this jives with my experiences as a sugarmaker.

I’m intrigued by the hypothesis that sugar content might be declining, but before such a decline is reported as fact, a journalist needs to scrutinize the methods involved with this “discovery” and ask how you can compare sap from today with sap from yesteryear when sugar content varies from year to year, tree to tree, run to run, and always has. As far as taste is concerned, the syrup we made this year, despite the wacky weather, was as good as anything we’ve ever made and lighter colored than usual. And as to the notion of an earlier season, yes it was early this year. But here’s our first boil date and last boil date from the last 10 years:

2003: March 9 – April 13
2004: March 1 – March 27
2005: March 14 – March 31
2006: February 17 – March 29
2007: March 12 – March 27
2008: March 5 – April 7
2009: March 3 – April 2
2010: February 28 – April 2
2011: March 10 – April 9
2012: February 19 – March 17

As you can see, it’s impossible to pin down “sugaring season.” There’s no fixed start and stop date, and there never has been. So if something has an amorphous beginning and end (that varies widely from region to region), how can we make a blanket statement that it’s starting 11.4 days earlier than it used to?

In each of these scenarios – Mike Daisey’s expose of Apple, Jason Russell’s expose of Joseph Kony, and an activist’s (or misguided journalist’s) invocation of maple sugaring as ground zero of climate change – mistruths are being construed, either consciously or unconsciously, as the lesser of two evils. This justification supposes that since there is good science that indicates that global temperatures are rising, and since there is documentation that some links of Apple’s supply chain are unsavory and exploitive, and since there’s evidence that seems to indicate that Joseph Kony is a horrible human being, then a little hyperbole to bring attention to a problem is not only not bad, it’s potentially good. Daisey expressed the position this way when Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” asked him why he didn’t come clean about his Apple lies during fact checking.

“I think I was terrified,” Daisey said, “that if I untied these things that the work, that I know is really good and tells a story, that does these really great things for making people care, that it would come apart in a way where – where it would ruin everything.”

On some human level, this line of thinking is perfectly understandable. If I’m telling a fish story, does it really matter if the fish was 12 or 20 inches? I mean, I caught a fish, after all. Such lies become even harder to resist when we’re arguing about something we “know” we’re right about. If a football fan, for instance, insists Jets quarterback Tim Tebow is a better quarterback than Tom Brady, who among us wouldn’t foam at the mouth and ask how you can even compare an option quarterback, with an arm that would make Garo Yepremian shake his head condescendingly, to a man who threw 60 touchdowns in a single season in 2008 (or was it 50? 2007?). Not that this has ever happened to me.

But outside of fishing and football, white, black, or rainbow-colored lies do matter, and they matter precisely because they can ruin everything. In the case of climate change, every time Mother Jones circulates a story like this, with a sensational headline, a ridiculous picture of a Japanese maple leaf, and reporting suggesting that “once-flourishing maple trees are shedding leaves too early in the season and producing sub-par sap,” a global warming skeptic gets a free pass to say: “See? These people have no idea what they’re talking about;” or worse: that the whole idea of climate change is a vast left wing conspiracy and the planet is, in fact, cooling. BS plus BS equals BS, and this whole important issue gets reduced to a partisan game of who can tell the biggest whopper.

I believe that the planet is warming up, that humans are contributing to this, and as the planet continues to warm there will be negative ecological consequences. Every time there’s an ice storm, I hold my breath, pray for my trees, and wonder if it’s a manifestation of climate change. But if we’re to build any consensus around environmental policy that seeks to address pollution and greenhouse gases, we have to speak to each other honestly. Journalists have to deal in facts, not half-truths. Activists should too if they want to be taken seriously.

Old school, fact-based journalism may have taken a backseat to populist internet reporting that blurs the line between theater and news, but journalists can still stand tall as beacons of integrity – as priests and sages in this quest for the truth.

David Carr – bless him – opened his New York Times piece with this lede:

Is it O.K. to lie on the way to telling a greater truth? The short answer is also the right one.

No.

Read Dave’s complete blog series on sugaring!

Read Dave’s complete blog series on sugaring!

I changed the filters in the RO, bled the intake line, pressed “start.” The high pressure pump kicked in like a little jet engine and spiked the pressure gauge up to 400 PSI. Once I’d made sure the water was going into the permeate tank and the concentrate up into the bulk tank in the eves, I set to work kindling a fire in the evaporator. Once the birch splints were crackling I did a walk around, checking the rig over for problems. Levels looked good. No leaks. As the fire gained momentum, niter began popping off the bottom of the front pan – mini, muffled explosions like a fireworks display in the next town over. It’s normal, but does indicate that the front pans need to be acid-washed. Question for you other sugarmakers: what do you use to clean niter scale?

Soon the sap in the pans began to hiss and faint tendrils of steam began to rise. I scooped out the sap scum that had accumulated in the back pan (picture the foam that appears in the backwaters of rivers and streams). Next, I heated some water and wiped down the canning tanks, the buckets, the stainless sides of the evaporator until they shone with sheen.

By now the fire needed tending, and I stirred the coal bed with a large iron poker, then crammed the firebox full again. The boiling began in earnest. There’s a temperature gauge on the side wall connected to a probe that lets me watch the liquid in the pans race to 212 degrees, then creep towards 216. I broke out the filter press and began to reassemble it, staggering the eight waffle plates between the cake plates and carefully placing filter papers at each union. The way these things work is you mix DE (also called filter aid, and technically called “food grade diatomaceous earth”) into the hot syrup that comes off the evaporator, then you pump the syrup through the filters. The “cake” filter plates fill with DE, and as the syrup recirculates, it flows through the cake and the adjacent filter papers, which scrubs the syrup clean.

Diatomaceous earth is a chalk-like sedimentary rock that’s made up of the fossilized skeletal remains of single cell organisms that existed millions of years ago; their pointy edges provide the scouring power. When you tell people that you filter your syrup with fossils, they tend to have follow up questions, like:

Are the diatoms plants or animals? This is a tricky question, because they’re algae, so to be technically correct, they’re “organisms.” If this answer gets a blank look, just say “plant,” and hope there’s not a botanist within ear shot to argue with you.

What do they look like? They’re sort of a random assortment of shapes – see picture above.

How old are they? Most of the commercial deposits are freshwater deposits that are between 24 million and 100,000 years old, but some salt water deposits are twice that age.

Where do they mine DE? All over the world, though no where locally that I know of. Something I read suggested that New York and New Hampshire have known diatomaceous sediments in existing lake bogs, but the sources are “undeveloped.”

Anyway, I was soon drawing off every 10 minutes or so, and we kept up this pace until 3 p.m., at which time we simmered through a collection, then fired everything up again. We were done by 9. In all it was an 80 gallon day. 90 percent of the sap came from the farm bush, which ran like gang busters. The Hall bush shut down in the heat, or never got going, I can’t tell which. We’ve gotten nothing out of that bush in the past two days – just a measly 200 or so gallons of ugly, milky sap.

Syrup to date: 325 (approximately)

Read Dave’s complete blog series on sugaring!

Went back home and worked until lunch. By then it was 55 degrees. Heard a forecast on the radio saying that next week we’re going to have sustained 50s and 60s here – a week of that can kill a season. Figured we’d better make syrup while we can, so I spent the afternoon chasing vacuum leaks in both sugarbushes. By the end of the day the farm was up to 18 inches – right around where it should be. Hall was at 15 out of 25. The mainlines had separated in three different places (and I’m afraid I missed one at Hall, judging by the low number).

It takes us about an hour round trip to go from the sugarhouse to either bush and collect 800 gallons of sap, so we worked in the woods until dark and then started collecting. Dad did one load I did the other. While pumping at the farm, a hazy, ovoid moon glowed from behind clouds in the east, and the western sky was mottled with contrails and reddish northern lights. They weren’t bright, like you see in the photographs of the far north, but they were significant enough to make the sky look like I’ve never seen it look before.

As I write this it’s 5:30 a.m. on Thursday and I have 2,400 gallons of sap waiting to be boiled. They’re saying highs of 62 today. I got to go.

Read Dave’s complete blog series on sugaring!

The weather has been a rollercoaster of late, whiplashing between scary-highs near 55° last week into near sub-zero readings the past few nights. Now they’re saying right back up to 50’s tomorrow, and on Thursday it’s supposed to hit 60 degrees, which is way too warm. The 60 degree mark is never a good thing to see, and we’re worried about what it might do to our grade and sap flow.

Syrup to date: 245 gallons.

Read Dave’s complete blog series on sugaring!

So to resume the grading/color/flavor discussion from earlier in the week, now you know that there are different colors of syrup and different flavors associated with the colors, but this is only part of the story, as the taste of syrup changes every day. No two barrels of syrup taste exactly alike, even if they’re both Grade A Medium Amber.

Now if the syrup’s “on,” as we tend to call it, the taste differences from batch to batch will be subtle. The basic flavor profile will be there, but there will be pleasant hints/shades/complexities that make each draw one of a kind. “Off” syrup is syrup that strays from the basic flavor profile, or features hints of something unpleasant.

Ask a scientist what accounts for the subtle differences in syrup taste and he or she might chalk things up to the variety of microorganisms that exists on the tree and in your tubing system. In the beginning of the year when things are cool, and if you use clean practices throughout the sap-to-sugar chain, you limit microbial contamination, thus producing nice, clean, light fancy syrup. As things warm, these microorganisms grow rapidly in sap. They clog up your taphole and tubing, but they also affect the taste. They create higher invert sugar levels, a higher degree of caramelization, and a dark color. According to my producer’s manual, in the beginning of the season you might have less than 1,000 microorganisms per milliliter of sap; by the end of the year, when the sap is cloudy and lactic-looking, microbial loads may be as high as one trillion per milliliter.

Ask an English major what causes the subtle differences in syrup taste, and they might say “terrior” – this notion that geography effects flavor. For instance, I might say that the taste of my syrup is influenced by the limestone deposits in my sugarbush; by the rich fecundity of the Valley of Vermont. You can tailor a similar claim to your backyard: just combine your state and region with words like “verdant” and “calciphilic.” Now as you’re picking up on, I was a Communications major, so I can’t buy this whole heartedly, but I do appreciate the imagination here, and I’ll play along and buy it to a certain point. I’ve been told that roadside maples can pick up a sodium taste from road salt, so if this is true, why couldn’t other minerals affect flavor in a positive way? Of course, even as I write that line my inner skeptic is pointing out that because syrup taste changes so much and so frequently, and is being influenced by literally hundreds of other factors (or trillions, if we consider microogranisms), it just seems impossible to tease “place” out and say: “that’s causing this taste.”

Off-flavors are both easier and harder to quantify. Some, like those known as “buddy” and “metabolism,” are organic, and there’s really nothing you can do about them as a producer. “Buddy” syrup has been described as tasting chocolaty or butterscotchy; “metabolism” flavor is woody or popcornish with hints of peanut butter and cardboard. I’m not making a joke here; this is all from my producer’s manual.

Thankfully, most off-flavors represent producer error and thus can be corrected and controlled. The niter on your pans changes flavor, the acid you use to keep the niter off your pans changes flavor, the defoamer you use to keep bubbles low can change flavor, the filters, the tanks, the containers, pretty much everything you do can effect flavor. One off-flavor in the manual is called “scorch.” Taste: “burned.” Cause: “burning of syrup.” Solution: “don’t burn syrup.”

Anyway, there is tons more to say on this subject but not enough time to say it. One obvious question here is how does sap from different kinds of maple trees affect taste? In other words, what does pure red maple syrup taste like compared to pure hard maple syrup compared to pure box elder syrup. And I don’t have a good answer. If any of you do, let us know.

Read Dave’s complete blog series on sugaring!