Maple Sap's About to Run

It was 61 degrees and sunny at Warrup's Farm in Redding on Friday — time for Bill Hill and his son Lincoln to slip on their snowshoes and head out into the woods.

Spring must be around the corner if Hill and his 19-year-old son are wandering amongst the five-acre sugarbush off John Read Road, adjusting the blue-tube plumbing system used to collect sap from the 350 maple trees nature planted there in a convenient cluster.

The 2011 maple syrup season has commenced.

Soon the two-man bucket brigade will begin to drill fresh holes into the trees in the woods and prepare to set up 200 aluminum buckets along John Read Road, tapping the ageless maples rising above the irregular stone walls.

It may be time by the calendar and the thermometer, but the buildup from January's serial snowstorms is keeping the middle part of the one-lane unpaved road closed. It will take a few more days of warm weather (Tuesday's 21 degrees did not help) to melt off the remaining top few feet of snow and allow a plow to do the rest.

The winding designated scenic road will become aluminum bucket alley.

Hill can't remember starting off a maple syruping season wearing snowshoes in the more than 30 years since he started tapping the maple trees on the 288-acre farm.

The utility of snowshoes was immediately obvious to a visitor who tried to keep up with them wearing only rubber rainboots. Forward motion followed the cadence of  "step, step, sink." The snow cover 18-24 inches deep was just beginning to soften under the welcome midday sun after chilling under an ice layer for weeks.

Even with snowshoes on, the going was tricky over stone walls and across a brook, its bed full of slippery moss-covered rocks.

"It's always nice to be in the woods, though," the senior Hill said.

The woods were still but for the babbling of the stream racing toward the Little River and the Hills' use of hand tools to tighten their mile-long system of 7/16" tubing — a "giant plumbing system," the senior Hill calls it — that's kept in place from season to season.

Stretches of the tubing had to be yanked up through the heavy snow cover. Where squirrels had chewed through, sections had to be cut out and sacrificed. The Hills used a 2-handed tubing splicer for such a task.

Lincoln, who's grown up as a farmhand at his father's side, wields the sight level to help adjust the tubing to be gravity-efficient.

"A blessing," the quiet senior Hill says, referring to his brown-haired son.

Once the trees are tapped and the sap starts gushing, it'll course toward a tank in the woods. The contents will be fed regularly to the evaporator on high ground to be boiled down to produce farm staples, maple syrup and maple sugar.

The trees are never treated with pesticides and the syrup is organic as a practical matter, but the Hills haven't gone through the complex and expensive process of gaining formal organic certification. Produce and flowers raised at Warrup's are certified organic.

Lately, the weather has become unpredictable, Hill said.

Last year's conditions — unfluctuating temperatures — made for a terrible harvest.

Ideally, temperatures will be in the 20s at night and reach 45 during the day to stimulate the freezing/thawing cycle believed necessary to trigger a sap gush.

Young and old are welcome to visit the farm's log cabin maple house to watch the sap thicken as it's boiled down.

Warrup's will be open to the public the first three weekends in March for sugaring demonstrations from 9 to 5. During the week, programs are offered for schoolchildren.

Bring your sweet tooth.

For more information call the farm at 203.938.9403