maple happenings at hhf ~ week 1 & 2

Folks! We’re still recovering from our BEST sales weekend ever. This community is amazing - so many returning customers and new faces too. The beautiful thing about our new sugarhouse space is we handled the influx of people with ease. It never felt terribly crowded, and customers respectfully kept the visitor traffic flowing. Thanks to all for making this possible, despite COVID restrictions. If you’re coming this weekend - masks and social distancing required. We’re offering tours with limited group sizes. A corner of the sugarhouse is set up so you can safely have a quick sample of the fresh syrup on your way through.

In the background, Tyler, Van and Brendan kept the maple syrup flowing! The fact is, we made a lot more syrup by this date last year. Mother Nature has been fickle. We had cold winter temperatures for SO long. Our first boil kicked off the season on March 1st - just in time to celebrate Tyler’s birthday. Then we had a 10 day stretch of cold. The sap just didn’t flow. We started back up March 11th-14th with temperatures nearing 60 degrees and two nights above freezing. Both sap trucks hit the road, and we made a bunch of syrup. Although we expected a big sap run, it didn’t run as well as we thought. It was simply too warm, too fast. Fortunately Mother Nature reset the weather on Sunday night. We’ve had a couple of solid below freezing nights, and today… it should be a perfect sugaring day. We expect a high in the upper 40s with night time temperatures well below freezing. We’ll take a few weeks of this weather - please and thank you!

Weekly Stats

IMG_0156[1].JPG — 2021 Maple tap count
2500

**First Boil - March 1, 2021**
22 3/4 gallons
Golden Delicate Grade
**Ten Days of No Sap**
**March 11, 2021 - 47 1/2 gallons**
Amber Rich Grade
**March 13th & 14th - 80+ gallons**
Dark Robust & Very Dark
First Open Sugarhouse Boil
**Maple Syrup Made to Date**
167.5 Gallons

The days are getting longer, and we certainly feel it during our busiest season of the year. It was all hands on deck last week to work the woods, haul sap, keep the sugarhouse equipment going, and make sure all our visitors felt welcome. Don’t forget the ever important job of taste testing that delicious liquid gold too! Due to the large fluctuation in weather - we’ve also made all four grades of maple syrup - Golden, Amber, Dark & Very Dark. That’s quite surprising for this early in the season. We expect it will return to an Amber Rich this week… but mother nature decides.

Looking back on the last week, we truly felt lucky to be doing what we love. We broke ground on this sugarhouse after the 2019 maple season. We boiled in it in 2020 only to shut down to the public shortly thereafter. It gave us time to do a lot of finish work and make this sugarhouse truly what our dreams were set out to be. Although we are still taking COVID precautions, it feels so good to welcome our community to share in this season. We have so many plans for this space and our future, but we’re taking it one step at a time for now.