Slow flow in Vermont’s sugar bushes

Take the state’s Maple Open House Weekend, held this past Saturday and Sunday. With hardly any sugarmakers actually making syrup, they had plenty of time to tell curious families and tourists how the process works, even if they were handing out samples of last year’s vintage.

“The one silver lining, really, is visitors had a lot more access to the sugarmakers than usual,” said Matt Gordon, executive director of the Vermont Maple Sugarmakers Association. Gordon, a Waterbury resident, spearheaded the 13th annual open house weekend.

“This year was definitely challenging,” he said. “There were maybe a few hundred gallons across the whole state.”

For a farmer like Stowe’s Paul Percy, who started sugaring in 1961 following in the footprints of his dad, who started in 1937, even a cold, late year like this one isn’t the coldest he’s ever seen.

“No two seasons are the same,” he said. “You get what you get and that’s all you can do.”

Percy has roughly 16,000 taps placed — high enough so the snow won’t cover them — and is just waiting, like everyone else in the state. He said the forecast for the end of this week bodes well for a fast, short run. And that’s the extent of his meteorological prognostication.

“By May 1, I’ll be able to tell you how it went,” Percy said.

In Waterbury, Holly Graves-Boucher is running a modest sugaring operation with her husband Denis Boucher and their kids. They have about 20 trees tapped on neighbor George Woodard’s land. Although it’s her first year at the helm, she’s no newbie to the maple sugaring experience; the Graves family — and before that the Gregg family —has been making syrup for more than 80 years.

“My brother said, ‘I don’t mind passing it down.’ It was like, ‘You’re up,’” she said.

During the second week in March, she and her husband trekked out to place taps and buckets. It was a nice, sunny day, and the snow was well above her knees, she said. Again, nothing new for her.

“The last time we tapped at Woodard’s I was five months pregnant with my daughter, who is now 11,” she said. “I was thigh-high in the snow then, too.”

Late run, good market

Everyone above a certain latitude is waiting for the sap to flow, including western states that produce syrup, according to Henry Marckres, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture’s maple specialist. Although much has been made of the cold winter, he said, it is not unusual for sugarers to wait until after the official beginning of spring to start boiling.

“Historically, there’s been a lot of syrup made in April,” Marckres said Monday. “And, with the right conditions, they could be boiling until May.”

The cold weather has been consistent, without significant warmth lasting long enough for trees to start budding. That can be a good thing, as “buddy”-tasting syrup isn’t exactly Fancy. The 2012 sugaring season started early, but it was over before the end of March in many places because the bitter bud taste set in — what Marckres refers to as “Mother Nature off-flavors.”

Marckres said the maple market is vibrant, with the United States and Canada keeping the prices up, just under $40 per gallon as of last year. And last year saw record production throughout the United States, a 70 percent increase over 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Much of the increased production is due to technology, with sugarers able to double the amount of syrup they can extract from sap. And Marckres said more trees are being tapped; in 2000, there were about 1 million taps nationally, and now there are around 4 million.

“The markets are really good and exports are up, and the industry has, for a while, stayed stable,” he said.

Gordon, again looking at the bright side, said another positive affect of the late run is that many sugarers are using the extra time to expand their sugarbushes, adding more taps. But it’s not easy in the deep snow.

“It’s been a tricky winter to get out into the woods,” he said. “It’s not easy to walk around out there.”