We’ve boiled twice since my last blog post, and both times were in support of pretty minor runs. Our season total is 67 gallons of syrup, which puts us at about 8 percent of a crop. Last year by this date we’d made 352 gallons. In 2012, we’d made 483 gallons by March 17, which was the last day of that season. That was the year a freak warm spell came and 80 degree temperatures ended everything early.
Since there’s no sugaring to talk about, we may as well talk about the weather. Maple sap flow is contingent on freezing and thawing temperatures – without a freeze/thaw cycle you won’t have sap moving.
Consistently warm temperatures kill a season. When it gets above 50 degrees, microbes start breaking down the sap and changing its chemical composition – read next week’s Outside Story column to learn more. If it doesn’t freeze at night, the sap doesn’t flow, your whole systems goes stagnant, the microbes flourish in the heat. They’ll eventually form a slimy film on the inside of the taphole and the sap will stop flowing permanently from that hole.
Cold temperatures – and this is the silver lining in this year’s slow start – just delay everything. But the closer we get to April here in southern Vermont, the more worried we get. We’re not natural record keepers, but we have been disciplined about recording the dates we’ve boiled and the syrup we’ve made on each particular day for the past two decades. Here’s the total number of days we boiled sap over the last 10 years, and in parentheses, the start date and end date of each season; this will give you a sense of where the season fell on the calendar.
2004: 17 days (3/1 – 3/27)
2005: 12 days (3/14 – 3/31)
2006: 13 days (2/17 – 3/29)
2007: 11 days (3/12 – 3/27)
2008: 21 days (3/5 – 4/7)
2009: 19 days (3/3 – 4/2)
2010: 14 days (2/28 – 4/2)
2011: 21 days (3/10 – 4/7)
2012: 14 days (2/19 – 3/17)
2013: 21 days (2/27 – 4/9)
2014: 3 days (2/23 – ??)
As you can see, the window changes from year to year. And the start time is always inconsistent. (2011 was a very good year for us, and we didn’t get started until March 10.) But the end date is more consistent. In 5 of the last 10 years, the season has ended here by April 1. (Meaning it got too warm.) Only once – last year – did we boil beyond the first week of April. So, statistically speaking, we’re running out of time.
It ran a little bit yesterday here, and should run a little more today. We’re participating in Vermont’s Maple Open House weekend this weekend, and thankfully we’ll have enough sap to boil on Saturday and Sunday. (New Hampshire, Maine, New York, are all holding open houses, too; click on the links to find a sugarhouse near you.) We may get a run Saturday. But then the long range forecast has it too cold for sap until the 27th of March.
What a year. It’s too early to call it a bust, but we’d all better make a pile of syrup awfully fast when the warm temperatures do come.
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