To tap or not

“I don’t know what’s going on,” said Jody Bronson, the longtime forest manager at Great Mountain Forest, up high on Canaan Mountain, when asked for his thoughts on the prospects for the upcoming maple syrup season. 

“We’ve got sugaring records here going back more than 70 years, and there’s been nothing like this winter. There’s no frost in the ground. It’s the end of January and Wangum Reservoir hasn’t frozen over yet. We’re ready for it, but it could turn out that this season’s sap run will be short and fast.”

A number of factors determine whether maple syrup production will be a bonanza or a bust. Sugar maples typically go through a period of dormancy in deep cold before the sap begins to rise in late winter and early spring during warmer days and cold nights. This December was so warm that there were barely any nights at all where the temperature dropped below freezing, and there has been no snow cover. Bronson told me that the amount of precipitation in November as the trees are entering dormancy is also important for sap production, and last November was dry.

An early thaw can sometimes start a premature run. My own records from over a decade tapping the backyard maple show that the sap ran on Jan. 6, 2007, after temperatures reached the 60s with a long, soaking rain the night before. A few days later the run stopped, and did not start again for two months. In 2006 the sap ran in late January, and the same in 2012. In 2005, though, I tapped on March 11. 

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What syrup producers like Bronson — and hobbyists like me — have come to consider typical for a sugaring season is a brief warm-up in early February when the sap begins to run, followed by another two weeks or so when it halts before the transition to warmer days gets well underway in March. 

When conditions are right the sap can run until the buds start to green up in early April, but if it gets warm too fast it can stop altogether. Winters like this one are not what we expect, which leaves us guessing, not only about the start date of the first sap run, but whether there will be a second one.

That first run usually has the highest sugar content, even if the volume of sap is modest. In a two-pail operation like mine, both of these are critical factors in determining whether I’ll be able to sugar off enough syrup to carry our family through until the following year. We consume 3/4 gallon of homemade syrup per annum, which is slightly above the average production rate for our century-old sugar maple. 

It typically requires at least 32 gallons of maple sap to make one gallon of sugar at our place. A short syrup season can have a measurable impact on the anticipated and customary consumption of pancakes, waffles and aebelskiver in our household.

Chances are that by the time this article appears in print, I will have stepped outside to the old sugar maple and checked for signs of weeping sap at the drill holes, made in its bark by our resident downy woodpeckers. If conditions look right and the temperatures are in the right range, I’ll set my spiles and hang the pails and see what the season brings.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at www.greensleeves.typepad.com.