It’s been awhile since my last post that’s for sure. Shortly after my February post everything turned to sugaring to the point that life was a blur! But what a season it turned out to be! And even now at the end of April, there’s still sugaring related things going on. It never truly ends I suppose. There’s always syrup orders to fill, wood to cut, and plans to make for the next season.
Last July I asked my Uncle if they would consider teaming up to sugar in 2026 at their idled operation on their farm. It had been 12 years since they had last made syrup there but all their equipment was still intact. Zane would be working out of town during sugaring season so I knew that going it alone was an almost impossible goal.My uncles agreed to the idea and we didn’t talk about it again for months actually. Our sugaring operations at the Homestead would sit idle for the first time in many years. A fact that took some getting used to at first.
We had to do repairs to the sap storage platform though as it was rotted at ground level where the support posts sit on blocks. It was a fairly easy fix and we completed it in a few hours. Everything else in the sugar house seemed ok. The wood shed there was completely full and would make 100 gallons of syrup if we used it all. So it was go. All we needed was to make it to around March 1st when we anticipated that the season would begin.
We had a rather traditional winter with cold and lots of snow. After December we really didn’t get any thaws of any magnitude so the snow depths began to add up! Around February 23rd I decided to snowshoe into my uncles big pasture,that’s actually named “The Big Pasture”, to scout out the sugarbush there. We had decided that it would be a good place to tap given its past performance years ago and given the amount of young maples there. It was tough snowshoeing back to the sugarbush but eventually I reached the forest and began counting possible tree taps. When I had gotten to around 200 taps I felt pretty confident that there would be no issues tapping several hundred trees there. I decided that I didn’t need to cover all the ground. Breaking trail in that deep snow was not easy. That made me think. How easy was it going to be breaking in the sap haul roads and getting the buckets out? There was some serious snow back in those woods!
The weather began to break just before March 1st with some warmer temperatures that began to melt the snow a little. We picked March 3rd to set up the sugar house a little. The evaporator needed a good cleaning and we needed to get the storage system setup also. Not to mention the gravity infill system we would be using. Getting the smoke stack up was quite a job for my uncles and I but we eventually succeeded. Sometimes it seems like everything is mega heavy. Not to mention the roof was rather slippery. Good times!
I decided that I wanted to get a few taps out so we started tapping the maples beside the sugar house. There’s a nice collection of trees on the level ground near it. We did around 25 taps and they were dripping some but nothing major. It was a start though and we were firmly committed to the season this point. The snow had already begun to settle more than I had anticipated which was a positive result of the warm weather. Temperatures close to 60 degrees the beginning of March aren’t on a sapsucker’s wish list but since when do we control the weather?
The unseasonably warm spell rolled on and the snow began to disappear quickly from then on.A boon for setting buckets but a potential disaster for a successful syrup season. It weighed on me some but it certainly was easier walking around in the sugarbush.We continued our work with the evaporator and got it flooded with water to check for leaks and boil it clean. This got our sap unloading and infill system working also. We continued setting buckets although I was rather concerned about our rather low number of taps. We would need to keep at it to get to the 400-500 total that I wanted.
The weekend came and I got some extra help. Uncle Art,Zane,Amy, and Patrick B. got a bunch of taps out on Saturday with me before a cold rain drove us in at the end of the day. The evaporator was clean and ready, and we had done our first gather early before we decided to tap more trees. Things were ramping up! It was coming together and the weather was cooperating.
During a break after gathering sap, we flooded the evaporator. I fired it up and just like that, we were launched into the next level of sugaring. My uncle took over the boiling so we headed back out to gather more sap. It was running well so that was encouraging. The warm weather was helping. By the end of the day my uncle got a small batch of syrup made. Things were going well! Fresh syrup!
Sunday morning would find us adding another 108 taps in a new section of the Big Pasture. We were well over 450 taps now. We spent the rest of the day gathering sap and getting it delivered to the sugar house. My uncle was boiling again and the batches were coming off like clockwork.It turned out to be a very productive day. But given the rate of the sap flow we knew that Monday was going to be a wild day most likely! We would have almost no help to gather! At this point in my post I realize that I will need a second one to finish the story! I will get to it soon I hope! There’s things to do!✍️