Maple syrup signifies the return of spring!  The longer days allow the sun to raise temperatures while the nights remain cold, ideal weather for sugaring. Like most aspects of farming the weather determines a large part of your success, in sugaring it is even more so. In order for trees to yield the watery sap that allows us to boil it into delicious maple syrup we need nights in the 20's and days in the low 40's. Any warmer and the trees shut down, much colder at night, it takes too long for the sap to get flowing to collect enough to make it worthwhile. The season last a brief 3-4 weeks depending upon the weather and then it just does not get cold enough at night. We collect our sap by tapping (drilling a small hole) the tree and placing a spile (the traditional sugarer's term) or spout into the hole and then hang the collection bucket from the spile. The sap drips in drop by drop and by the end of a good day you might get 3 to 4 gallons of sap from a tap. That is the easy part, the hard part comes from lugging the buckets of fresh sap to your collection tank, often through two or three feet of snow in the early part of the season. What is enough sap? Well it typically takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. How we make our syrup: We produce our syrup utilizing the slow traditional method of boiling the water out of the sap over a roaring wood fire in our evaporator until there is just the right amount of sugar concentrated from the sap to make maple syrup. There are more modern techniques to make syrup from sap, such as reverse osmosis to remove much of the water, but in our opinion it also removes some of the flavor. Our packaging: After all the work that goes into making a great pure maple syrup we want to pack it in the best possible way to preserve the great maple flavor and to us the only choice is glass. Why glass? When was the last time you had a great glass of wine that came packed in a plastic bottle or tin can? A special treat: You can make your own maple sugar candy right at home in the microwave. Just place about ¼ inch of syrup in the bottom of a two cup microwavable measuring cup. Place the syrup in the microwave and set the timer for two minutes on high. Do not walk away; you need to watch this carefully!! Watch the syrup and you will see it start to boil allow it to  continue to boil and foam until it reaches the top of the measuring cup, then pause the microwave and allow the foam to settle, as soon as it does, repeat this process over and over until the 2 minutes runs out. Then with a heavy potholder (the bowl is very hot!!!) remove the measuring cup and begin to stir rapidly with a metal spoon. Continue this for 3-4 minutes (it might seem like an hour) until it turns into maple sugar candy. Then the fun begins to decide who gets to lick the spoon, the bowl and who actually gets the maple sugar candy.