It’s on. We collected about 300 gallons of sap today on our partially-tapped bush up in Strafford. Tomorrow we’ll tap the Thetford Center location. I’d boil, but tomorrow I’ll have to run up to Fletcher, Vermont to pick up a used reverse osmosis unit. Without it we’d have to boil for 30 hours a day [...]

For the past few years, we’ve come to be friends with Sue Baker, the woman who owns the sugarbush we rent in strafford for making maple syrup. We’ve built up that maple syrup business from the 700 taps her late husband sugared up to about 2,000 today. All along, we’ve been working with her to [...]

We planned to put it up at the end of the summer, when we first finished the new sap barn, but of course, stuff intervened. We wound up heaving this 600-gallon monster steel tank up into the loft only after the first snows had come, making it all the harder and heavier. The opening up [...]

Common sense may say otherwise, but fall is the time maple syrup makers’ minds turn to thoughts of making even more maple syrup. They see beautiful yellow lines of sugar maple trees yet untapped for lack of that one last roll of 5/16th inch line last year. Over the summer, the memory metastasizes into schemes. [...]

They aren’t really new trees. Average age is perhaps 75, and ranging between 40 years old and 150 years old. Probably half of them have been tapped before, a few generations ago in the days of horses and buckets. But to me they’re new, and they seem to be multiplying as I’m running line to [...]

We took down the old greenhouse where we used to keep our main sap tank and its vacuum system, replacing it with the “sap barn,” a two-story affair that Robert and the boys put up in a few weeks over the summer. The barn itself is nice enough, but there are a couple special features [...]

In maple sugaring, the equipment that claims the cruelest name is the “extractor,” a device that sounds like it preys on maple trees. What it really does is separate out the sap flowing down toward a vacuum system and puts it into a storage tank without interrupting the flow of vacuum to the tree.

[The Not-Very-Quaint [...]

It’s been a couple days since we last boiled, as the sap flow has slowed with the warming weather, and along with it our maple syrup production.
The boil we did do, though, was a doozy, with steam coming out in clouds, the wind taking it in all directions, once sending it down Tucker Hill Road [...]

[Bosco Take Break for a Moment]
Thetford, Vermont is a strange and wonderful place, filled with interesting people and creatures. Over on the other side of town, up on Houghton Hill, there is a dog named Bosco who makes maple syrup with buckets. We visited him during a slow time last week, taking a few pictures.
Lacking [...]

Reader Question: This was our first year making maple syrup with our 3 children, 3 and younger. We started late in the season but successfully made 2 gallons from two 100 ft sugar maple trees on our property. I tapped the trees with plastic spiles, 7 in total. Now that the season is finishing, do [...]