2021 has been off to a brisk start here at the farm. Every new year we weather the doldrums of winter, dreaming of spring field work and planting season. The true harbinger of spring here, though, is syrup season. It nearly always begins in the snow, and ends after everything has melted away.
In the grand scheme of things, syrup season is relatively new here on the farm. I started tapping trees in in 2014, with six taps and a turkey cooker. The bug bit me hard though, and now we’re up to 29 taps and a hobby scale evaporator that I ordered last year from Smoky Lake Maple Products. We make syrup almost exclusively for ourselves, and to give some away as gifts. I’ve sold a very small quantity over the years, and in the future we may offer it as a farm product, but we’re not quite up to that scale yet.
This year we ran through about 300 gallons of sap. That should yield us somewhere between six and eight gallons of finished syrup, but we won’t know for sure until we refine it on the kitchen stove and get it into jars. The evaporator does all the grunt work and boils off 99% of the excess water, which leaves (hopefully) a minimal amount to do in the kitchen. As you can see, we get a lot of equipment in on the action, including our old Pettibone construction telehandler. It’s great for lifting up that tote of sap so that everything can gravity feed into the pans!
In the future I’d like to put up a small sugar shack to house the evaporator. Cooking outside the garage in the open air is great when the weather cooperates, but this year we had a series of cold, windy days that made tending the operation pretty uncomfortable. In years past I’ve stood out in rain and snow, and huddled under a blanket while cooking late into the night under freezing conditions. So for sheer comfort, some basic walls and a roof would help a lot, and it would provide storage for the equipment during the rest of the year.
