Desjardins Maple Syrup History
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We Moved to Belchertown Ma. in 1999 after a year long renovation of a 125 year old farmhouse.
For some odd reason.. maybe I was bit by a maple bug, I tried tapping one of our trees one spring. we boiled on the kitchen stove (to my wife's dismay) ,and with good success we made about 1 pint of the stuff the first year. after that each year we went up from 1 pt to 3/4 of a gallon to 5 gals then last season(2003)we made a good 15 gallons. after the first year we boiled outside on make shift evaporators until 2003 season, Then we used a leader half pint evaporator in the old garage . in mid 2004 we bought our wood fired 2'x6' Evaporator, rebuilt the garage into a nice working sugarhouse. in 2005 we converted the evaporator to oil which will help us boil more frequently and shorter periods.
when temperatures at the end of winter change and we have freezing nights and warm days, Sap starts to move in the maple tree, this is the start of sugar season. We have tapped mostly roadside sugar maples, this year we ran pipeline with vacuum in our sugarbush behind our house, and another location, both made up of sugar maples and red maples. we have almost 300 taps,and will be expanding to over 600 in 2009. we collect the sap every day, and boil till it's done.
It takes nearly 40 gallons of sap from the maple tree to make 1 gallon of pure maple syrup
. With our evaporator we make almost 1 gallon of syrup an hour, in previous years it took us almost 7 hours to make 1 gallon. Our goal is to make over 100 gallons/year
WE HIT OUR GOAL
The 2008 Sugar season was a perfect season, we had almost 5 weeks of steady 20deg nights and 40deg days, giving us the opportunity to make 100 gallons of the sweet stuff.
We will be expanding again in 2009 to a larger 3 X 8 evaporator and now will be looking to a new goal of 200 gallons made in the future seasons
We also have Chickens that we get great farm fresh eggs from, eggs along with the Maple Syrup and a few garden vegetables will make up the produce of a small farm stand next year.
