I am sitting here watching it pour rain and thinking that March is one of the most maddening months in Vermont. It can be absolutely the best skiing of the year with the most spectacular sunshine and warm days on the mountain that you have ever experienced, or it can be like it is today – pouring rain. But despite the change in weather almost daily, it is one of my favorite months.

Why? Because it is maple sugaring time. The sap has begun to run in the trees, you drive down one of the roads in Stowe and you see a trail of blue lines decorating the maple trees. When I am showing people real estate they ask me what the process is to make maple syrup. Most of them know the syrup comes from trees and that it taste good.

Back in the day, as they say, the maple trees were tapped with a spigot from which a bucket was hung. Sometimes a tree could have three buckets on it at once. Oh, I forgot to mention that there are various types of maple trees but the ones that produce the syrup are sugar maples. Makes sense doesn’t it? Anyway, collecting the syrup from a full bucket meant that you had to team up the horses or start up the tractor , then with a holding tank on the back of a sled, you dump each bucket into the holding tank. Taking the holding tank full of sap back to the sugar house, it is siphoned into a larger holding tank, that feeds into the evaporator. From there it goes into the back pan where it boils over chambers to the front pan where it boils through a series of chambers until it becomes syrup.

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