Greetings from Harding Hill Farm!

When we started our new sugarhouse build in 2019, we never anticipated we would close to visitors due to a global pandemic. It’s hard to absorb how much has changed in our world from when I wrote my 2019 season wrap up just one year ago. While there are many challenges, we are trying to focus on the good here at the farm, practice social distancing, and put one foot in front of the other as best we can.

We are grateful for all our supportive and cooperative community members! Despite our mid-season closure of the sugarhouse, many of you took advantage of curbside pickup of our farm products. As a result, we are nearly sold out of grass fed beef. The pre-order requests and positive reviews continue flowing in… which really does mean a great deal to us. Maple syrup production continued in the sugarhouse until April 4th, and we have plenty on hand to fill order requests. If you’re interested in placing an order, our website home page features quick links to farm product prices and availability.

and what a maple season it was…

The 2020 maple season preparations took a lot more energy this year! As the season got closer, we were finishing up our new sugarhouse build, setting up a reverse osmosis machine, and preparing our production and retail space. There was a lot of change, but we still make our maple syrup over the same wood-fired evaporator. Most of our maple equipment remained the same from previous seasons – although we did add additional sap storage tanks and a maple syrup draw off pan. We also had to balance our demands in the sugarhouse with the usual time spent in the woods checking our tubing system and tapping trees. It made for some long days, late nights, and tired farmers.

There were several key people who stepped in to help in those final days, and for that, we are very grateful. The HHF maple season kicked off with our first boil on March 4th followed by a fun family dinner in the sugarhouse on March 5th. The first week of the season came with an enormous sap run, stretching our sap storage capabilities to the max. It was full steam ahead (pun intended) from our first boil to the last.

From March 4th to April 4th, we made syrup on 21 of the 31 days. We collected a total of 40,650 gallons of maple sap. The majority of our sap comes from 1,250 taps in our Newport sugarbush, and we also purchased sap from a few local friends. The average sugar content of the maple sap this season was low at 1.3%. That means it took about 66 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. We would much rather see that number at a 40 to 1 ratio, which saves on both time and firewood needed to produce syrup. If our maple sap averaged 2.0% sugar content from the same volume of sap, we would have made 1,014 gallons of maple syrup. That would have been impressive record for HHF!

In the final days in the sugarhouse and during cleanup, we reflected back on the whirlwind that was the 2020 maple season. Although there are many great memories of the old sugarhouse on the Johnson property, we absolutely love our new building and proximity to our main farm. We have much more space for maple production, storage, retail activities, and parking. A few equipment changes improved our production efficiency. Our new reverse osmosis (RO) machine increased efficiency of production with the capability of processing 800 to 1,200 gallons of sap per hour. This machine removes water from the maple sap, concentrating the sugar content up to 10% before it flows into the evaporator. This allows us to make syrup with less time boiling and less firewood needed to fuel the evaporator. We used 7 cords of firewood this season. With our old RO machine, we would have used 20 cords to process the same volume of sap.

As the season moved along, we were fortunate to have very few issues in our woods – our vacuum levels stayed high with limited problems. In past years, we’ve had issues with squirrel and deer damage to tubing and downed branches/trees on lines. It was also strange to have such little snow this season. We only traveled on snowshoes during the initial week of maple tapping in February. The mild weather continued throughout the whole season and often threatened to push our trees into spring budding which stops the sap run.

On April 4th, we fired up the evaporator for the last boil of the season. We ended the day with 645 gallons of 2020 maple syrup – the second best production in the HHF records.

With so many changes and improvements this season, we can’t help but be disappointed that we couldn’t share it with more of you. We had two weekends of visitors before we really moved into a ‘stay at home’ order here in New Hampshire. Our world looks a bit different now and the situation with this virus continues to evolve. Although we miss our visitors and sharing our passion for maple, we feel fortunate that we could continue making syrup behind the scenes. I also made a push to share more through social media so you can experience the sugarhouse from afar. We look forward to a time when we can invite our community back to the sugarhouse for a proper grand opening celebration!

Be sure to check back soon for my next blog about the changing seasons.