First run

Sunny and beautiful Saturday but quite chilly.We had thought to have sap to gather, but not to be. There may have been sap running Friday from trees that are more in the open, but our orchard is sheltered from the sun and bounded by the icy cold river. And the snow is deep - as Rachel found out last weekend! Kate and Margie hiked down to the orchard late in the day and found that the sap had decided to run, with quite a bit in the buckets on the sunnier side of the orchard, so plans were made to gather on Sunday.

Ed has been busy getting everything ready in the sugar house and is anxious to get started, now that Mother Nature is ready to cooperate. This will be his first season boiling the sap on his own, as his Dad passed away in the summer. But he had a good teacher and will be producing the same high quality syrup the Parsons have been famous for for many years.

A cold night Saturday made the first sap run a bit of a challenge, as, at first glance, it appeared the sap was frozen solid. But after Kate called her Dad back at the barn for advice (what did we ever do without cell phones!), she developed an effective technique. Using a sharp stick, she punched 2-3 holes through the ice to allow the sap underneath to flow out into her gathering pail. Then she was able to dump the ice on the ground, re-hang the bucket, and move on to the next of the 1200 buckets. After 4 1/2 hours, Kate, Margie, Henry, Ed and Ethan(who arrived from Boston at midnight Saturday to help) had collected all the sap, about 20 barrels. ( A barrel is 42 gallons and it takes nearly one barrel to make one gallon of sap.) Today (or tomorrow, since the weatherman was right and we really got 10 inches of snow!), Ed will lay a fire in the arch and set that sap to cooking. It takes several hours of boiling for the sap to reach the proper temperature to draw off as syrup. This is a bit of an art, and we know Ed is up to the task.

So stop by, or shop on line, to get some of our first run syrup - there's nothing quite like it!