After moving back to Connecticut from Vermont, I find I miss the ubiquity of maple sugaring. It’s not like Connecticut doesn’t have maple producers – back in high school I used to help my friend Ben collect sap during spring break – but there aren’t as many as there are up north. When I worked in Vermont, I feel like I photographed some form of sugaring at least once every year. It seemed like every time I drove down a back road, I’d see pails, tubes, or even better, steam rising from an evaporator. When I wanted to do a story about sugaring down here, I had to hunt around to find more than a handful of potential subjects. But when we did, the smell of the sugar house was as sweet as ever. Katie Warchut and I went to Maple Leaf Farm in Canterbury to profile a very modern operation:

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For a more traditional take, I paid three visits to theday.com’s outdoors blogger Steve Fagin, who taps trees by hand and then boils his sap on an open fire:

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