Don and Jay, our Belgian draft horses working with Jeff to collect sap from our maple trees

Welcome to spring at Sugarbush Farm. March and early April finds the entire Luce family busy making maple syrup. Maple Sugaring is really family time because we are spending many hours together in the sugar house while Jeff and Ralph bring in the sap from the sugar woods and boil it down to our Pure Vermont Maple Syrup.

If you would like to visit, please call us at 800-281-1757 or send us an email at contact@sugarbushfarm.com and we will try to give you an idea of our sap boiling schedule. Our sugarhouse is open every day even if we aren't boiling sap, so you can tour and get a good idea of how it works. Walk on our maple trail and see the buckets and sap lines. Watch how our sap comes out of the tree and how it is collected. On March 24th-25th our farm, along with others in the state, will celebrate Official Maple Open House Weekend.

Sap looks just like water when it drips out of the maple tree. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon on syrup.

As the weather warms for sap flows, the snow slowly melts and Vermont's gravel roads turn to mud. If you visit during mud season, be sure to wear your boots and hope your car is high enough to get through the deep ruts and mud. Please call if you have questions about road conditions.

Precise weather is required for making syrup. We need a cold night about 20 degrees F and then a warm sunny day in the 40's and low 50's for good sap flow. So we can never predict more than a few days ahead of time which days we will actually be boiling maple sap. Also check our Facebook page for maple sugaring & boiling updates.

Early May find Larry and Ralph ready to start plowing fields for another years crop of corn, hay and alfalfa.

We tap about 7,000 trees and hope to make about a quart from each tree. We start making the Fancy grade light syrup at the beginning of the season, then progress to Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber and end with grade B, more Robust flavor, just before the buds open and the season ends.

By mid-April its usually warm enough that the buds start to open on the maple trees so the maple sap becomes bitter & sugaring is over for another year. Except, that is, for the two weeks of cleaning up all the equipment & putting our sugarhouse back to an educational display.

Late May when Vermont becomes green with apple blossoms and new leaves. The draft horses and Jersey calves are happy to be out in the pasture.

In late April and early May, our pasture fences are repaired from winter storms and then our herd of Angus beef cattle is put out to green pastures with their new babies. We hope to have about 50 new calves born by mid-May and its so much fun to see them rompiing in the grass. We have to start harrowing the fields for planting feed corn that will be harvested in the fall. The leaves really come out on our trees about mid-May and we feel its safe to plant our gardens around Memorial Day.