Plumes of steam are finally rising from sugar shacks across New Hampshire, after a cold winter delayed maple season longer than usual.
At Six Saplings Sugarhouse in Wilmot, David Atwood and his family get up early this time of year. On days when conditions are just right and sap is flowing, they start boiling around 6:30. This year, Atwood’s grandson has started running their evaporator.
“We're trying to save every ounce of sap and gather every ounce that we can get,” Atwood said. “We're so far behind last year.”
In the second week of March, the farm was about 1,100 gallons of syrup behind schedule.
Atwood is hoping for colder temperatures to come. Hot weather, like the days that have reached into the 60s and 70s already this spring, slows the sap down.
“If it stays hot like this, the buds on the trees will start. And then once they start, the sap starts getting nasty,” he said. “They call it buddy sap. It doesn't taste as nice.”
At Blueberry Hill Sugarworks in Raymond, Jason Thomas is in the same boat. Sap started flowing about two weeks after what he considers normal timing. But, he said, all the snow on the ground could help extend the season.
“Sometimes the season is three weeks long and sometimes it's eight weeks long,” he said.
Maple trees need particular temperatures for sap to start flowing: nights just below freezing, days just above. Sun helps, too. Those conditions are becoming less reliable as climate change makes New England’s winters warmer.
“It used to be a lot more predictable as to the days that we would start,” said Louis Plante, the owner of Bear Mountain Maple in Hinsdale. “Middle of February was our first boil for 20-something years.”
Over the last decade, the beginning of maple season has crept into January. But cold snaps still happen. This year’s freezing periods seemed especially long, Plante said, though he was able to boil for one day in January before a five-week break.
If the weather doesn’t get too warm, Plante says Bear Mountain could tie their record production. On an average day, that means he’s going between tending a fire under the family’s old-fashioned evaporator, collecting hundreds of sap buckets, or bottling maple syrup. Most of the work happens in the afternoon, when his day job is over.
“When the sun starts setting, we’ll go collect all the buckets and then just boil until we don’t have any sap left or we’re too tired to keep going,” he said. “We’ve had three or four 17-hour days of boiling straight this season already.”
The exhaustion is worth it, though. Plante says maple season is one of the few times he and his brother can spend time together without the other pressures of life.
“It’s nice to just be there and just be, literally, watching water boil,” he said.
