Our First Sugaring Season

Late winter is maple sugaring time. In the woods all over Vermont, blue plastic tubing zigzags through the trees, directing gallons of sweet, clear sap from taps to collection tanks. At twilight, steam rolls out the tops of sugar houses where the wood-fired evaporators are boiling down the day’s run into sweet, dark syrup. It’s our first winter here on our new property, an 1836 farmhouse with almost 3.5 acres. Starting a maple sugaring operation was one of our major goals for this year and since J grew up sugaring with his family, he was eager to jump into the process.

As the season winds down, we’ve collected around 500 gallons of sap from fifty maple trees on our property. Preparation started in the Fall, marking the largest maples with bright tape so we could easily identify them during winter when they are without leaves. After Christmas, we purchased and prepared the equipment-- taps, tubing, connectors, and collection tanks--and began setting up the lines. People who sugar as a business increasingly use vacuum pumps to extract the sap and propel it efficiently toward the collection sites, and then reverse osmosis to remove the water from the sap and speed up boiling time. But this is a small scale family hobby for us so we are keeping it old-school and inexpensive. We even used metal buckets on a few trees where tubing didn’t make sense. Buckets are more labor intensive but they certainly have a nostalgic charm to people who grew up around maple sugaring. 

It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup and the success of any year’s crop is highly dependent upon weather conditions. Warm days and cool nights are the best combination and typically the sap does not begin running until late February or early March. An exceptionally cold winter this year delayed the season a couple of weeks. It’s the second week of April and we have been collecting thirty to sixty gallons of sap a day. J’s brother boils it down nightly in his sugar house and has made 28 gallons of syrup from sap collected on three different properties. As daytime temperatures begin to reach the 50s, the season is winding down. Eventually the sap turns yellowish and less sweet, a sign that the tree is turning its energy into new leaves and sugaring is over for another year.