Maple Syrup Season

The maple syrup season is in full swing. It came a bit late with repeated shots of winter but recent warm days has the sap running nicely followed by freezing nights and a few fronts moving through to keep things flowing. Always hard to know how long the season will last but freezing nights and not too warm of days which causes the trees to bud, is the key.

When my parents first moved to Maplelag, they were in to maple syruping hard core. To be honest with, it was my least favorite time of year. It was hard work! My dad drilling holes in maple trees.

 My mom tapping in the taps.

 Sister and I following with buckets ready to be hung. This was the easy part.

Collecting sap. The above photo shows no snow on the ground. Some years the snow would be knee deep or higher which made carrying two five gallon buckets that much more challenging. Spilling buckets with nice clean sap was not good.

 Back in the day, we used metal buckets but today plastic bags are more common and some systems using tubing to eliminate the collecting.

During one of my 30 days of skiing outings, I met up with Dave Spidahl of Spidahl's Gaard and he had a few trees tapped with large containers. We no longer syrup here at Maplelag but still serve the real stuff, with most of the syrup coming from Kroll's.  Nice article in the paper about them with good information if curious...

After growing up with pure maple syrup and still using it today, it is hard to have anything else. Of course pancakes, waffles are the best but served over ice cream with granola sprinkled on top is quite tasty.

Looking back, it was a lot of hard work but always interesting to see how the season would play out since every year was different. We sold all the equipment used in the maple syrup process including the big evaporator when the ski business took off but always wanted to try and get a small operation going so the kids could experience the work involved and to enjoy fresh syrup right from the own back yard!