The soil of Lower Canada is particularly suited to the growth of small grain. Tobacco also thrives well in it; it is only raised, however, in small quantities for private use, more than one half of what is used in the country being imported. The Canadian tobacco is of a much milder quality than that grown in Maryland and Virginia: the snuff made from it is held in great estimation.
VEGETABLE PRODUCTIONS.
Culinary vegetables of every description come to the greatest perfection in Canada, as well as most of the European fruits: the currants, gooseberries, and raspberries are in particular very fine; the latter are indigenous, and are found in profusion in the woods; the vine is also indigenous, but the grapes which it produces in its uncultivated state are very poor, sour, and but little larger than fine currants.
The variety of trees found in the forests of Canada is prodigious, and it is supposed that many kinds are still unknown: beech trees, oaks, elms, ashes, pines, sycamores, chesnuts, walnuts, of each of which several different species are commonly met with; the sugar maple tree is also found in almost every part of the country, a tree never seen but upon good ground. There are two kinds of this very valuable tree in Canada; the one called the swamp maple, from its being generally found upon low lands; the other, the mountain or curled maple, from growing upon high dry ground, and from the grain of the wood being very beautifully variegated with little stripes and curls. The former yields a much greater quantity of sap, in proportion to its size, than the other, but this sap does not afford so much sugar as that of the curled maple. A pound of sugar is frequently procured from two or three gallons of the sap of the curled maple, whereas no more than the same quantity can be had from six or seven gallons of that of the swamp.
The most approved method of getting the sap is by piercing a hole with an auger in the side of the tree, of one inch or an inch and a half in diameter, and two or three inches in depth, obliquely upwards; but the most common mode of coming at it is by cutting a large gash in the tree with an axe. In each case a small spout is fixed at the bottom of the wound, and a vessel is placed underneath to receive the liquor as it falls.
A maple tree of the diameter of twenty inches will commonly yield sufficient sap for making five pounds of sugar each year, and instances have been known of trees yielding nearly this quantity annually for a series of thirty years. Trees that have been gashed and mangled with an axe will not last by any means so long as those which have been carefully pierced with an auger; the axe, however, is generally used, because the sap distils much faster from the wound made by it than from that made by an auger, and it is always an object with the farmer, to have the sap brought home, and boiled down as speedily as possible, in order that the making of sugar may not interfere with his other agricultural pursuits. The season for tapping the trees is when the sap begins to rise, at the commencement of spring, which is just the time that the farmer is most busied in making preparations for sowing his grain.
MAPLE TREES.
It is a very remarkable fact, that these trees, after having been tapped for six or seven successive years, always yield more sap than they do on being first wounded; this sap, however, is not so rich as that which the trees distil for the first time; but from its coming in an increased portion, as much sugar is generally procured from a single tree on the fifth or sixth year of its being tapped as on the first.
The maple is the only sort of raw sugar made use of in the country parts of Canada; it is very generally used also by the inhabitants of the towns, whither it is brought for sale by the country people who attend the markets, just the same as any other kind of country produce. The most common form in which it is seen is in loaves or thick round cakes, precisely as it comes out of the vessel where it is boiled down from the sap. These cakes are of a very dark colour in general, and very hard; as they are wanted they are scraped down with a knife, and when thus reduced into powder, the sugar appears of a much lighter cast, and not unlike West Indian muscovada or grained sugar. If the maple sugar be carefully boiled with lime, whites of eggs, blood, or any of the other articles usually employed for clarifying sugar, and properly granulated, by the draining off of the molasses, it is by no means inferior, either in point of strength, flavour, or appearance to the eye, to any West Indian sugar whatsoever: simply boiled down into cakes with milk or whites of eggs it is very agreeable to the taste.
The ingenious Dr. Nooth, of Quebec, who is at the head of the general hospital in Canada, has made a variety of experiments upon the manufacture of maple sugar; he has granulated, and also refined it, so as to render it equal to the best lump sugar that is made in England. To convince the Canadians also, who are as incredulous on some points as they are credulous on others, that it was really maple sugar which they saw thus refined, he has contrived to leave large lumps, exhibiting the sugar in its different stages towards refinement, the lower part of the lumps being left hard, similar to the common cakes, the middle part granulated, and the upper part refined.