My wife Annie and I once saw this little exhibit of a hobby evaporator, and she said, “I’d like to give that a try.” So we started looking into it. A guy in North Granville was selling his evaporator because he was getting a bigger one and so I ended up making a deal with him. The first year we did that with wood on raw sap; which I think for anybody getting into it is the only way to do it. You’ll learn so much as a foundation, and then you learn where you want to go. I eventually converted to oil, and I still have a lot of respect for people who burn wood. We just don’t have the manpower, it’s just Annie and I. Someone who has a lot of help or kids that can run the fire box then yes, I agree with wood for that but for us it just isn’t feasible. We got the reverse osmosis machine last season and that was just an unbelievable difference. And for us, the quality of syrup stays the same because I’m not going for huge amounts, I’m going for quality. This year we purchased a new evaporator and we’re hoping it’s going to make a difference. I’m kind of concerned about where the markets going because there’s so much syrup out there it’s kind of scary to do any big expansions. There is some retail that we do, but it’s more along the lines of friends and family that buy it and then there’s some landowners that let me collect sap off their land so I trade them syrup for the sap. Everything else just goes wholesale usually.
Sugaring is great exercise, it’s great being outdoors and at the end of the season, you really feel like you’ve accomplished something. People that haven’t burned down their sugarhouse or haven’t gotten injured know they have accomplished something. It’s a great hobby - it’s an expensive hobby, but we don’t camp, we don’t fish, we don’t go on vacations, this is what we do. And it goes good with the bees that we raise too. Annie does craft fairs with her knitting, and she usually takes honey and syrup with her and sells that on the side. It’s amazing just how few people understand the maple syrup business and why it costs $50 a gallon. Everything about this is expensive, and there are no shortcuts. There’s only one way to do it and that’s to do it right. When the season gets here, and you’re just scrambling to collect sap, boil sap, and can everything, there’s already enough that could go wrong you don’t need your woods acting up on you either. There’s so much involved in this and I can’t afford anyone else coming in and doing this for me. If I can’t do it myself then I don’t want to do it. But it’s been great, it’s a lot fun. You meet a lot of great people, and if you listen to people, you can get a lot of new ideas on how to do different things. Something someone figured out sixty years ago can still work today. Some of the old stuff is still better than some of the new. I don’t think it’s just fun, but it’s also tradition. It’s family time together, and it gives you appreciation for what some people have to do to earn a living. There are some sugar houses up in northern Vermont that burn through 160,000 gallons of sap and they have college kids come in who run their evaporators, and quite honestly, their budget has got to be scary, but I still think that at the end of the year, the small families doing it together have ten times the amount of fun compared to the bigger guys.
This, for us is a hobby, this isn’t our living and I don’t ever see it becoming our living, but it’s just something we enjoy doing. I’d like to do this for another fifteen years but who knows. It’s quality time for my wife and I together, and there are also people who stop down and visit. If you stay on the smaller side, it’s way more fun, it’s more relaxing, it isn’t high pressure, and it’s not do or die until the end of the season. On a day like this you could be inside watching football, but I don’t watch football, I’m out here doing this. It’s a reason for me to be outside all day every day. It’s very addictive, and you have to set your priorities of where you want to go as far as size. We’re gonna be at about 1,550 taps this year and that’s all I want to take care of, I don’t want anymore than that. Everybody has their own limits of how far they’re willing to go. Being out in the woods doing this you learn a lot about nature, and a lot about squirrels. I was out here yesterday and there were fourteen tubing lines up, but about seven of them were lying on the ground. Those squirrels had chewed right through every single one of them. It took us all day to get those lines back up. I have a lot of respect for people who want to do this. It’s tough, but it’s a good, fun time. I’m not regretting getting into it. Growing up as kids we did it in the house and you’d watch the wallpaper fall off from all the steam while we were boiling. Then I helped other people do it over the years because things hadn’t lined up enough in my life for me to do it myself. This is something that you have to commit to. You really have to be ready. I had one supplier in Pittsford, Vermont tell me “I can sell anybody anything they want except one thing, and that’s ambition.” If you don’t have the ambition, this is not the hobby for you. This requires a lot of work, a lot of thinking and a lot of preparation, and if you’re not willing to do that then forget it. This is just something you’re gonna waste money on. It’s something I’m glad I got into and I’m glad I’m doing it the way I am, but I can’t see getting any bigger. Eventually, it just becomes too much.