Filed under: March 2018 | Tags: in like a lion, maple sap, maple syrup, maple syrup season, March snow storms, Small Farming
March 9, 2018
What a roller coaster maple syrup season we have been having! We started off with a bang in mid-February. We had lots of sap as the temperatures rose to unseasonable highs. It lasted for a few days, but boy were we busy! We boiled until after midnight several nights.
March blew in like a lion and buried us in a wet heavy snow, that closed schools and made driving hazardous. Since then we have had one small run here at the farm where the bulk of our sugarbush is in a small valley next to the river. My son lives a few miles away on a ridge. His sugarbush is about 500 hard maples. Several of those trees are very large and situated in their yard and along the road. His trees seem to gush sap every time the sun shines! These trees have kept us in sap making for a good season so far.
Thanks in part to my son’s sugarbush and us gathering partial bags, we have boiled five times so far. We are making syrup and having a great time. The horses are liking the partial loads as they toughen up from a winter rest. It has been an unpredictable season so far, that has caught us off guard more than once.
Today, after another March snow storm that has blanketed us with about 8 inches of snow, the sap is not running and thankfully….neither am I
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RicelandMeadows 
Ralph, our season here in middle Tennessee was short and sweet. Started in late January and finished in mid February. Our weather turned warm, ending sap runs. This week, mid-March, we have cold nights again, but now the sap is “buddy”. On a sad note, loggers are coming to cut in my neighbors woods where I do some tapping. They’ve marked 16 of the biggest and best producing sugar maples. There’ll still be plenty of nice tappable trees, but it still makes me sad to think of losing any of them.
Comment by Ken McGarry March 13, 2018 @ 9:52 pm