The freezing temperatures and double helpings of snow each snowstorm are great for skiing, but it is not good weather for tapping for sap to produce maple syrup.
As of mid-February, the cold winter lineup extended for another two weeks, according to maple syrup producer Jeffrey Kingsbury of Kingsbury Farm in South Deerfield, MA. He’s been following the weather patterns.
“Last year we started boiling at the end of January. We usually start earlier here in the valley, then in the hills, but we haven’t started yet,” he said. He usually produces 180 gallons a season.
“There’s been a run on syrup. Everybody’s been asking me for maple syrup and I told them I’ll let them know when I start boiling,” he said. He has only 11 pints left of the syrup he produced last year. He’s been selling the syrup like (you guessed it) hotcakes on the farm’s website, kingsburyfarms.com, that they set up three years ago. He launched the website during COVID, but it was an idea he’d already been steering toward for a while.
Kingsbury started sugaring when he was 12 years old. He was mentored by a neighbor, Bill Web, in Greenfield, MA, who is still sugaring. “He taught me how to sugar. I got out of it when I started raising kids,” Kingsbury said.
Now 66, he started sugaring again 10 years ago.
He started in a 10-by-12-foot sugar shack at his Sand Gully Road North home. “Everybody told me during that first year that it was too small,” he said.
They were right. He now sugars in a building three times that size piggybacked onto the first sugarhouse. When the sap is collected, an 800-gallon tank holds the sap outside the original sugarhouse.
“We’ll bring that much sap in in a day when the sap’s running good. We need at least 35º during the day weather for the sap to run,” he said.
Jeffrey Kingsbury with maple syrup produced in his South Deerfield sugarhouse. Photo by Laura Rodley
From the outside holding tank, it is piped into a 650-gallon tank that takes up the entire room of the old sugar shack. Then it’s fed through pipes to a reverse osmosis tank that takes moisture out of the sap to reduce the number of hours it needs to boil to render the sap into syrup, at a ratio of 40 gallons of sap boiled down to make one gallon of syrup.
At the moment, he already has 650 taps into maples to draw the sap and has 300 to 400 to go. He has five 275-gallon tanks that hold the sap until he collects it.
He used to collect sap solely in buckets. He’s going back to collecting in buckets in one area on a road where it’s easier to use buckets and access the lines.
For the last decade, his sap operation had been getting bigger and bigger before it reached a plateau. His current six-by-two-foot evaporator could be replaced by a bigger evaporator that would handle sap from 1,500 taps.
“If I could find one for a good price, I’d probably do it,” he said. “It would cut down on boiling time.”
He is assisted by his son Joshua Kingsbury (of Shutesbury, MA). His other son, Scott Kingsbury, lives in Ohio.
He burns about five cords of wood a year for boiling, almost all of it free. Most of it he gets from a buddy at a South Deerfield sawmill. People also bring him firewood, making his enterprise both sustainable and cost-effective.
He also raises and sells Christmas trees. Last Christmas season he sold 250 trees. He planted his first trees in April 1985, just before he started building his house on the property. The trees are mostly balsam and white spruce. He plants anywhere from 500 to 600 new trees a year. He currently has 3,000 trees planted over three acres.
“People say one out of five trees end up not making a good Christmas tree.” For Kingsbury, it’s all good. If a tree isn’t perfect, he goes into the grove and uses it as greenery.
Meanwhile, he and his two chocolate Labs have a great time in the snow trimming the trees, setting the taps and waiting for the sap to be ready.
“I love sugaring. It’s a sickness. Once you’re doing it, you can’t stop,” said Kingsbury.
by Laura Rodley
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