Sap not running

By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer

Maple syrup making is getting a late start this winter.

“Last year we started producing Feb. 8,” Randy Galusha, owner of Toad Hill Maple Farm in Athol, told The Chronicle.

This year is “more like an old-fashioned sugar season we used to have when I was younger,” he said.

“It’s been a very cold winter and things haven’t really broken free to start production yet.”

He suspects, “Probably the week before our first Maple Weekend [Thurman Maple Days starts March 14] is when it looks like it will thaw out.”

Freezing nights and thawing days are the ideal weather for syrup production.

Matt Rathbun, owner of Rathbun’s Maple Sugar House in Whitehall, sounded the same theme. “Nothing yet,” he told The Chronicle Friday. “Maybe later next week.”

Asked if it will be a good maple season, “No way of knowing,” Mr. Rathbun said.

“You try to make as much as you can when you can,” he said.

Even without sap flowing, producers are busy preparing for when it does.

Toad Hill’s Mr. Galusha said, “Pretty much everybody up here, all the other farms, have been busy getting their taps in. We’ve started our vacuum system and we’re pretty much waiting for Mother Nature to thaw out and let the sap start flowing.”

He said Thurman Maple Days, which runs three weekends, is “growing tremendously. We’ve dubbed ourselves the Maple Capital of New York,” he said. “There’s five commercial sugar houses within close proximity. Each of the sugar houses has its own unique flavor and atmosphere.”

Mr. Galusha said Toad Hill is usually able to tap earlier in the season than in the past because of a changing climate and technology. “We’re finding there’s more early thawing cycles that happen in January and early February,” he said. “In a lot of years we are making syrup much earlier than we did traditionally.” In the past “a lot of maple producers didn’t even bother tapping until the first of March.”

With new tech, “Nowadays all our trees are connected together by a tubing system,” Mr. Galusha said. “There’s 15 miles of tubing. The sap is automatically pumped into large tanks at the sugar house. 2,000 gallons of sap an hour.”

“When I was a boy we started out hanging buckets on trees. It was very traditional.” Now Mr. Galusha showed The Chronicle a new monitoring system called CDL Intelligence that Toad Hill just purchased to keep track of sap levels in tanks and vacuum levels in the tubing system. It displays detailed information on a map projected onto a flat screen TV.

“We run high vacuum to maximize production,” Mr. Galusha explained.

“It has no negative impacts on the trees, but periodically leaks develop and this system helps us identify when they occur and the general location, so we can make timely repairs and keep our production up.”

Toad Hill also just put in a more efficient wood fired evaporator. “It will burn less wood, and we don’t have to fire it as frequently,” Mr. Galusha said. “It runs much more smoothly.”

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