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 [...]
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 produced 520 gallons on the farm this year ourselves, and bought in a bunch more from people who have maple syrup operations adjacent to ours. It’s not a large supply given the demand we’ve seen over the past year, but it’ll do.
We’re still cleaning lines, as usual taking us a lot longer than we [...]
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 [...]
One of the pleasures of maple sugar season is watching the wildlife come back in the spring. My favorite part of a sugaring evening is taking a break standing on the high drive and watching woodcock and bats flit about over the field. But, unfortunately, the bats are coming out too early.
There is a disease [...]
Yesterday warmed, and today we should be getting a good run, provided the wind doesn’t come up and knock down the sap. We took advantage of the slow flow yesterday to do some more sugarhouse fiddling, including getting the water going (more below) and arguing about how we should move maple syrup from the evaporator [...]
That column of water on the left is hitting the ceiling and showering down all over the vacuum room. I had the clever idea to test to see if I’d hooked up the correct plugs by flicking the sap extractor’s electronic trigger. Well, it worked to show me the plug was in the wrong place. [...]
Doing some work on the sugarhouse a few days ago, we saw a bobcat slip into the field behind our home. My cell phone camera is bad, even among cell phone cameras, so the picture didn’t come out very well. The creature looked a whole heck of a lot larger than what I thought a [...]
Saturday we tapped the Hubbard Hill bush. Five of us teemed over the hill, putting up 500 taps into holes we drilled into the trees. That night I moved the tapping equipment – mostly power drills with extra batteries and rechargers over at the Strafford bush in preparation for tapping on Sunday. Driving over with [...]