Ferme et Forêt

Weather Weirding

When describing the 2023 maple syrup season, one word comes most often to mind: weird. With deepening climate instability, we’ve all come to expect weird weather, but it’s still surprising when it happens. From an unprecedentedly early start, to a slow middle, and a mercilessly fast end – with an ice storm and power outage thrown in for good measure – it was a wild ride. Mix in a little covid too, and the only thing that saved our sanity was that we actually didn’t get that much sap to make syrup from – which, while meaning less work, also means less profits. So, in a word: weird.

My story begins not in the frozen maple woodlands, but in the sun-soaked Dominican Republic. I took my first vacation overseas in nine years, taking my son to the DR for the last week of January and first week of February. Normally I tap our maple trees in the second half of February, so I figured this would be a safe time to get away. But the whole winter had been mild, and I had been afraid of an early warm-up. Once temperatures start getting above zero regularly, you want your trees to be already tapped and ready to collect sweet sap. Sure enough, as my return plane was touching down in Ottawa, it was looking like such a warm up was right around the corner. The day after my relaxing Caribbean vacation, I was on snowshoes trudging through what then looked to me like a barren northern wasteland, drilling holes in our 2800 maple trees and tapping in the spouts that will deliver the sap into our collection tubing.

Sometimes the animals tap the trees too, but a little more aggressively.

I figured if I worked flat out, and got maybe one other person to help me, I might be able to get the tapping done in time to catch the first run of sap. I had developed a sore throat pretty much as soon as I had breathed my first breath of winter air upon my return, but chalked it up to just not being used to the cold, dry air of Canada. But several days in, my sore throat metastasized into full born flu symptoms. I never tested positive for covid, but it sure felt like the covid that had lain me flat for two weeks last summer. I worked through it for as long as I could, wheezing up hills like a 90-year-old, but eventually had to take a few days to lay semi-consciously on the couch. Getting seriously sick during maple syrup season is always one of our worst nightmares, but fortunately we were able to find a few extra hands on short notice who could come in and finish the tapping in time. Thank you Joëlle, Yannick, Gareth, and Ginger!!!

The woods echo with the busy tapping of our helpers.

We did our first boil the 17th of February – about two weeks earlier than ever before. But it wasn’t more than a light appetizer for the season to come – we didn’t even produce any syrup from that first boil – and the window of warmer weather abruptly slammed shut again for another month. Winter was not done with us yet. The weather had pulled a classic “hurry up and wait” on us. Much of the sap we collected froze solid in our tanks, which would take weeks to melt and hack away at later. At least it gave us time to get a new heating element for our bottler.

We didn’t fire up our old Dominion and Grimm evaporator again until the 16th of March. We then entered an unusually pleasant period of just boiling every 2-4 days, with time in between to attend to bottling, cleaning, and repairing leaks in the woods. For the next three weeks, we worked uncharacteristically reasonable 40 hour work weeks. We weren’t producing as much syrup as we would have liked, but we were still optimistic that the “real” season would begin in April and we’d then get a string of big production days. The still deep snowpack seemed to indicate spring remained a good ways away.

The only hiccup, which hit us in early April, was that our reverse osmosis machine stopped working. It is a magical device that concentrates the sugar content in the sap from about 2% to 8%, cutting down both our boiling time and firewood usage by about three-quarters. But it was a simple fix; we soon had the new part installed and our beloved “Ozzie” was only down for a couple of days.  

The remains of “le gros chunk” of frozen sap in our tank, weeks after it first formed.

The ice storm that ravaged Quebec in early April brought these halcyon days to an end. Our farm is lucky enough to be on the same electrical line as the hospital, so our power has never gone out for more than a few hours. But this time it was for 24 hours – still far less than many, but enough to cause some problems. While we can still collect and boil sap without electricity, we can’t pump it from one of our tanks to our sugar shack, we can’t use our reverse osmosis, we can’t filter it with our filter press, and we can’t heat it up to bottle it. When we woke up the morning after the storm and still found the power out, I went to my mom’s to fetch my generator, and was just in the process of dragging it on a sled down to the tank in the field to pump it out when the power came back on. So in the end, the only disruption was that we had a backlog of sap to boil over the next two days.

A potential bigger problem was the amount of trees the ice might have brought down in the sugar bush, and the damage that would do to our sap collection tubing. During the afternoon of the storm, I could hear crashes about once a minute as branches and trees fell in the woods. Our big old willow in the backyard was completely felled by the weight of a quarter inch of ice on its branches. The next day, with our power restored and our vacuum pumps working again, we could see that the vacuum  levels had fallen from about 25 inHg to almost nothing – indicating many large air leaks in our collection system. Again, though, our community rose to the occasion and my brother-in-law and his kids, plus our son (since schools were closed), took to the woods with walkie-talkies and in one afternoon we had everything repaired. Thanks Jean-Charles, Louis, Jacob, Noah, and Téo!!!

Just before the ice storm hit, both Genevieve and our son were off sick for a day, and shortly after we made it though that ring of ice I came down with the same virus. This time I did test positive for covid. Come on! Seriously ill twice in one maple season? What had I done to offend the gods? Fortunately, the second (or perhaps third?) time around with covid wasn’t nearly as bad, and in a couple of days I was back at work.

True to the climate weirdness we’re now all trying to get used to, we went in short order from the ice storm in early April to four straight days above 20 degrees in mid-April, thus blasting right through the sweet spot of 0 – 10° Celsius that is perfect for syrup making. We still boiled for the first two of those unseasonably hot days, but with increasingly funky smelling sap, and syrup that was nigh impossible to push through the filter press, we had to call it a season on April 14.

When the steam settled, the reality dawned on us that we’d had our worst season since our very first – and that was back when we knew much less what we were doing, had no vacuum pumps, and had to throw out a bunch of sap that had gone bad because we couldn’t boil it fast enough (since we had no osmosis at that time). We produced about 25% less than our average, and a full 2000 litres less than our record-busting 2022 season. Although modern maple technologies like high vacuum can turn disastrous years into okay ones, we are still highly dependent on the temperatures Mother Nature throws at us in March and April (and increasingly February), and this game is one of boom and bust.  

The one silver lining is that we didn’t emerge from the season exhausted like we normally do. In 2022, we spent 164 hours boiling; this year, just 69. But this is one time of year when we want to be working hard, because that means we’re making syrup.

At least we didn’t have it as bad as one maple producer we know, whose sugar bush is just a little bit cooler than ours. When the temperature was just above zero and the sap was flowing a bit for us in the second half of March, his trees were still too cold and not giving much sap. Then the temperature spiked and his season was over at the same time as ours. His production was down 50% – his worst season in the 20+ years he’s made syrup.

By the same token, people a bit to the south of us had a very good year. But I imagine that most of Quebec, where 70% of the world’s supply of syrup is made, did not have a very good year. Syrup prices should remain stable, though, since there is still inventory left over from last year’s bumper crop.

We made almost exclusively amber grade syrup this year. The sap never really flowed fast enough for golden, and we only made dark for those last two hot days of the season (high temperatures usually lead to dark syrup). As a result, our entire supply of dark syrup is going to Syrup Share members who pre-ordered during the first two days we accepted orders back in January. Moral of the story: if you want dark syrup, become a Syrup Share member and order early.

Our low supply of syrup means you probably won’t be seeing much maple pies or fudge this year. Our lack of dark syrup also means we won’t have any of our syrup trios available. But we will still keep our shelves stocked with maple butter – it would be a crime to deprive our customers of that.

We’ve already sold nearly half of this year’s supply to our Syrup Share members, so we will certainly sell out the rest of it sometime this summer. If you want to get some, we recommend you don’t dilly-dally! A life without maple syrup would be too weird to conceive.