2021 Season Recap
Well, we wrapped up an interesting season on April 4th. After a mild and too warm Nov-Jan, we had winter arrive with a vengeance in February. We tapped in 3’ of snow, most of it done wearing snowshoes. This really slowed things down and was quite a body of work. With the tough going I was only getting about 400 taps done a day, which is about half of what I like to do. We didn’t have a single thaw and sap run in February, then things started to break loose as soon as March came around. 2 weeks of good sap cycles of freezing night followed by thaws started the month out, then it seemed like summer arrived. We still had sap running, but warm temperatures make everything tough for syrup makers. Warm sap spoils quickly, so that meant collecting and processing sap quickly, and cleaning tanks a LOT! We fought through it and had great sap flow for the conditions. It seemed like our higher altitude and mostly north facing woods were good to us for those conditions. On April 3rd the syrup started to come of the evaporator noticeably lighter and we also lost flavor at the same time. As the trees begin to wake up from dormancy, they start to move a bunch of other stuff in the sap. These metabolic processes give the syrup a distinctive off flavor (buddy and metabolic are the terms used), and it isn’t anything you’d want to put on pancakes! So we called it a season and started pulling taps. Pulling taps is good fun work in the woods, and with the help of the boys and a few of their buddies we made quick work of it. The post season cleanup isn’t as fun, but we are making good headway on that as well as addressing all the other projects I try to put off during the chaotic maple season.
It looks like all of the Northeast and Canada had a tough short season and I’ve seen numbers of 30%+ below average production for the season. Overall we were around 10% down, so we had a relatively good year.
Onward and upward now….I’m looking forward to forestry work in our woods again, and we’ll be either adding a new area with 1500 taps or replacing an aging system we have in another woods. The jury is out on which direction we go, but it’ll be a lot of hard work and fun either way! Cheers!
