Ian, I’m sorry to hear that your season looks to be about as poor as ours.

On 2356 taps, we’ve made 391 gallons so far. If the season stalls and stops (weather predictions are discouraging) this is pretty bad. We have this much largely due to our vacuum system. Locals without vacuum are seeing much worse performance. Take away the sap we get when the neighbors trees aren’t running, and we’d have only half this syrup.

Also our home bush above our house has produced only 20 gallons of syrup (500 trees). And it DOES have vacuum. Is south and east facing, low and a very early bush. Tapped it on March 3 and it produced milky sap before we could even hammer in the spiles.

Our new 806 taps on a north-facing hill have performed well with our old 1050 taps on the east face of same hill doing only about as well as yourn.

Grade is very high, making the maple flavor more subtle. We’re just now producing the good stuff, with dark amber and grade b.

Moved the boiling operation to our strafford bush. Much more space, added another used r.o. Using oil to fire which is handy but just not the same.

Crew having fun. Life’s (and science’s) problems just about solved during boiling discussions. Sure utopia would be reached it the season got cold and allowed us to continue for another two or three weeks.

If you southerners finish up early, come on up and commiserate. But don’t pull those taps yet. Our best hope, again, remains that our weathermen are mostly wrong.

Good luck, -Tig
Thetford Center

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 with the amount of sap we expect from the new taps – that’s even with our other used RO going full-out. We’ll have added about 1,250 new trees to the bush by the end, getting to a total of about 2,700 or thereabouts.

We’ve been pretty busy in the past few weeks, running lines, tapping and moving equipment to the Strafford sugar shack. That’s where we’ll be making most of the maple syrup this year, rather than in our Thetford Center shack. We’ve grown to the extent that we need the extra capacity.

Today we had our annual Town Meeting here in Thetford. Road Foreman? Off sugaring. Fire Chief? Ditto. I should have been too. The weather wasn’t the greatest for it (not cold enough these last few nights), but it sure would have helped to make up for some lost time. Now that the budget’s passed, we can get serious.

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 suss out how to best permanently preserve this working maple syrup operation and amazing wildlife habitat. Last week, it all finally came to pass, as she signed a conservation easement with the Upper Valley Land Trust. The 212 acre lot will now permanently serve Strafford and Thetford Vermont as a diverse set of habitats and forested spaces.

Border Collie Fetching Sue's Xmas Tree Just Prior to Easement

The easement also included a good deal of flexibility for making maple syrup or other serious agricultural pursuits on the property, which means that over generations, a wider population can own and steward this property, allowing it to pay for itself in a sustainable fashion. We feel very, very priviledged to be the next couple to help protect the property. Working a piece of land like this for maple syrup quickly allows it to work into your blood. We are all lucky that in Vermont there are many Sue Bakers out there keeping the state green.

Building on our maple syrup keg concept from some months ago, Ellie and I installed a system the new counter top that sits on our dishwasher. For less than $50, we purchased the hardware needed to have a professional draft beer tap hooked into a 13 gallon keg of bulk maple syrup sitting under our sink. Pressured up to 500 pounds per square inch, this guy will give us a year’s supply of maple syrup on demand.

We designed this originally for some of our small- and medium-scaled food manufacturer clients – folks like Ola Granola and Red Kite Candies, who use a significant amount of our maple syrup for their yummy products, and find it difficult to handle large barrels in their kitchen facilities. It turned out, though, that while the flow of maple syrup is fine for personal use, it’s too slow for efficient application when drawing a few cups at a time. But now we’re getting interest from folks looking to install a draft maple syrup system in their own kitchens. Nothing Vermontier than maple syrup on tap.

We planned to put it up at the end of the summer, when we first finished the new maple syrup barn, but of course, stuff intervened. We wound up heaving this 600-gallon monster steel tank up into the maple syrup storage loft only after the first snows had come, making it all the harder and heavier. The opening up there was built with this tank in mind (as well as bringing up 55 gallon drums of maple syrup), but that didn’t stop me and Robert from arguing whether it would or wouldn’t actually fit when the moment came. In the end it did, but not with much in the way of room for error.

Robert and I heaved it up onto its small side and lifted it over our heads to the point where the boys could grasp it from above. Problem was, they couldn’t quite reach down all the way to the tank, even standing on its side, so one had to hold the other out the window a bit to grab a hold. It was not a pleasant site to see when standing below the tank pushing upward with all one’s might.

Somehow they managed, man-handling the tank to stick straight out so as to fit inside. Heard lots of grunting and scuffling up in there. While transfixed by this, stairing up at the rising tank, it occured to me that standing 16 feet below this precarious situation wasn’t too clever. Had it fallen on my head, I probably would have dented it. So I stepped aside and took these photos while they walked the tank all the way into the barn’s second floor.

This tank will hold the sap coming down from Hubbard Hill, our smaller bush with 550 trees. We have a new vacuum (or new to us at least) to set up, and that’ll keep us in plumbing for a few weeks to come. On the other side of the loft, we store the large barrels of finished bulk and wholesale maple syrup.