Maple Syrup season is about over

Geoff Gevalt writes about the season's end of his maple syup making in Vermont in his editor's blog he writes for his Young Writers Project.. You can click on the headline to read his post, but here are a couple of graphs snipped out.

On Sunday, when it was snowing and raining and hailing and blowing, I was outside under our “sugar roof” boiling sap. I love making maple syrup. It slows me down, makes me think and forces me to look around. This year, the season has been weird; the sap ran in late December but not again until late March. It came in spits and starts and then, finally, unleashed.

So I was standing out under the roof, the wind howling in, snow almost landing in the evaporator pan before the steam would melt it, at the last moment.
[snip] [snip] [snip]

Season’s pretty well over. I’ve got a couple of gallons in pots to filter out and bottle. But many of the taps have dried up, a few others have been attacked by ants and the others are producing yellowish sap that is too far gone. I was hoping to squeeze one more run out of the trees, but it looks like it’s just too late in the year and it gets too hot too quickly. By hot I mean 45 or 50. And we haven’t had cold enough nights — barely freezing and a lot of days where it was above freezing.

So on Saturday I’ll take them down.