Slow start, but now maple sap is running

CORNWALL — On a cold and damp mid-March day, nothing feels as good as huddling in a cloud of the sweet-smelling steam of a sugar shack.

At Ridgway Farm, teens Zack Larson and Ian Ridgway were helping out in the shack, mostly making sure the fire under the evaporator remained stoked with wood. About six cords will be burned by the time the maple sap stops running; if it’s a good year, they will produce about 150 gallons of maple syrup.

“We started boiling on Wednesday,” Ian said on Saturday, March 14. “It take about seven hours of boiling to reduce the sap into syrup. We drew the first of it off today.”

As a youngster who grew up as part of the family’s organic farming business, he knows as well as anyone about the quirks of the brief sugar season.

“I think we are about the first to start boiling. This may be the latest the season has ever started,” he said. 

It takes temperatures below freezing at night and above 40 degrees or so during the day to get the sap flowing. 

Like other Northwest Corner denizens, the maples seem  anxious to cast over a deep-set winter and move quickly into spring (which officially arrives March 20): The sap is flowing well. 

At the Ridgways, a large number of taps, close to 1,000, has given them enough maple sap to start boiling. 

The young men were happy to be out of the rain on that Saturday. Ian’s dad, First Selectman (and farmer) Gordon Ridgway, was out collecting sap from the tree taps that don’t run directly into the tubing system. 

It wasn’t easy conquering the snow this year to get the taps in. 

“We still have buckets in some places instead of tubing, and the snow was so high that we had to set the buckets on top of it rather than hanging them from the taps,” Ian said. “Once the snow started to melt, the buckets dropped down with it. And they weren’t attached.”