I first had an interest in sugaring when I noticed that the trees on my mother and father’s lawn were tapped, and so the curiosity was always there as a youngster. I remember drinking the sap out of the buckets and getting yelled at for doing so. That was probably when I was about eight years old. Then, by the time I was about eleven or twelve we were hanging our first buckets for a guy in Pawlet that I was friends with and the interest was still there. Over the next ten years I worked for this guy or that guy doing the different aspects of maple as far as cutting fire wood, carrying sap, tapping trees and then we went on to another dry spell where I didn’t do too much. When my oldest daughter was old enough to do something, we decided to tap a few trees together. We started out with just a few pieces of pipeline and some coffee cans. Within three years we had 1,500 pails out; a couple backyard pans and a three and a half by twelve wood fire and a three by ten oil fire with a preheater. We eventually went to a reverse osmosis machine and we were up to 2,500 taps, all on pipeline. We’ve always tried to make enough syrup to have what we thought we could retail. We still do that today. For me, It’s just fun to make syrup, and I find it crazy that to this day a lot of people have still never tasted real maple syrup. They don’t know what they’re missing! There’s all kinds of uses for it too; it’s a direct substitute for sugar, and it’s healthier for you. Just after using it for a little while, people really begin see the difference and they start to understand why we push for it in terms of nutritional value.
We make a pile of different products now. It’s not just the syrup but we make maple cream, maple candies, maple fudge, all kinds of coated nuts, sometimes even some jam. We have that stuff available almost year round and get calls about it all the time. One of the biggest things we do now is the granulated maple sugar, that’s a big seller for us. It seems like everybody that gets involved with maple gets more attracted to it and wants to be more involved with it. Other than it just being a unique food chain, along with the technique of it, it’s a lot of work and a lot of hours turning that sap into syrup. Even though I can still do it right now, I would eventually like to see somebody in my family take over because just as we speak, there’s three or four big companies that are taking maple to a whole new level. I suspect that in the future the small time operators could become non-existent. That’s a sad possibility and I wouldn’t like to see it, but it’s just like the dairy farmers. The 35 cow dairy farms are long gone and were replaced by something way bigger.
Even since I’ve started, there’s been huge changes in this industry, and there are still changes coming day to day.