Well, the “Big Snow” last weekend was mostly rain, with just a mini-blizzard at the end. This did cover everything with two inches of very picturesque, winter wonderland frosting. We will take what we can get.

A wet snow at the sugar house. Steam from boiling sap rises from the cupola.

The cold snap that followed the rain and snow triggered a moderate, three-day sap run. This fizzled out on Thursday when the temperatures got up into the 60’s again. By Friday, the Red Maple buds were swelling and crimson: this is the end-game for Acer Rubra. Michael and Wheeler pulled the taps from the red maples on the tail-end of the freeze on Saturday morning. Doug and Maeve stayed back and kept the fires warm on the home front. In all, 158 taps were pulled which is almost exactly twenty percent of our total taps. The 464 remaining taps are nearly all sugar maple, and they can go quite a bit longer before budding out. We left a few red maple taps in because their buds were not yet swelling. The Reds that remain are mostly understory trees. The tallest, most dominant trees and trees along the edges of fields get more sun and tend to bloom first, while the smaller trees competing for prominence bloom later.

The weather forecast in the coming week has no freezing temperatures. Not. Good. Worse, it is slated to get into the 70’s on Thursday. Although a sugar maker needs temperatures above freezing for the sap to run, days this warm can affect the viability of tap holes in the maple trees. This kind of weather is somewhat unfamiliar territory so early in the season. We are going to attempt to bridge the heat wave to the next cold snap (whenever that may be) by leaving the vacuum on through the warm spell. This should, in theory, keep the taps fresh, but this strategy will only hold for so long before the holes go dry. We have done this before with success, but we need a freeze before the end of the month, or the season will be over this week.

The sap run that started Saturday will make almost pure Sugar Maple syrup so we should see some new, interesting flavors in the next batch of finished product. The sap flow was slow to get started after a low of eighteen degrees on Saturday morning, but it looks like we will be boiling on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. After that, we will see what happens.

Doug, steady at his post, stoking the fire in the evaporator.

This year’s production has been among our best early-season totals ever, but the yield for the late-season is not looking too favorable. One cannot help but ponder all of these beans in the jar from this summer… There was fog every morning, all thirty-one days of August, here at Waterfall Farm. For each one of those mornings, we added a bean to our mason jar. The old-timers tell us that those beans ought to carry-over to equal number of snowfalls in the winter. There have not been thirty-one snowfalls yet, but we suppose that winter is not over yet. If there’s anything that we have learned from sugaring, it’s that the weather in March is a wild card.