The 2025 season has just about mirrored the 2021/2022 seasons, a cold winter with an extreme warmup in March. We’ve made around 2/3rds of a crop so far in a short two week period. It’s hard to predict where the season will go now, our extended forecast shows some ~28° nights coming, which may or may not be cold enough to rejuvenate the trees and extend the season.

This year we completely switched over to arc-barb spouts from middle valley maple. The good part is that we think they produce around 25% more sap compared to conventional spouts. The bad news is that a large number have been heaving out of the trees, dropping our vacuum levels. It’s very frustrating to walk 250+ acres and achieve high vacuum just to watch it slowly drop down ~0.5″Hg every day. We’re still ahead but will have to figure out a different strategy next year.

All of our vacuum pump changes and sap filter are performing great this year. Our Robinson sugar bush improvements have mostly worked as planned, but on Monday we’re swapping out the 20GPM 1/2HP deep well pump in the new releaser with the 10GPM version. A combination of elevation gain, 3/4″ transfer line friction, and atmosphere to vacuum pressure have put the current pump at the edge of its capabilities, causing intermittent failure. In addition to the new pump being rated for an additional 50′ of head, the lower flow rate will reduce the friction in the 3/4″ mainline by 61′. Switching to 1″ mainline over 500′ of distance would have reduced friction loss by 61′, but the pump change is the easier and quicker choice for us right now. Sometimes I forget that I was an engineer before maple farmer!

We finished setting up our new sap filter in November, and finally had a chance to use it last month. Here is a video from the first run at the beginning of February. We had a long freeze up in the middle of the month, but got to run the filter again nonstop last week. It’s done an amazing job so far and is incredibly easy to run/clean!

After hurrying up to get tapped last month we’ve been patiently waiting for warm weather. The forecast keeps teasing us with 40° days, only to have them come in at 35° for a short period. This week’s forecast doesn’t look any better, spring has to come eventually though! We’ve used this time to replenish our dwindling inventory, make several improvements to pump houses, and work on our online stores.

Last year Amazon promised us the ability to add our candy to their subscribe and save program. Unfortunately this never materialized, and talking to Amazon seller support is about as useful as talking to a dead maple tree. In November we decided to start sending some candy to their warehouses to supplement what we send out direct here, the idea being that if they only ship half of what we sell their turnover will be high enough to keep the candy fresh. So far, after three months, it’s been a success. In addition to lightening our daily shipment load, our candy is now available on their subscribe and save program and often has the Prime badge. Personally, we use this service every month for both convenience and savings. It has been a huge success with our other products, so we’re happy to have our candy in the program now. We still prefer direct orders, but we know that sometimes it makes sense to purchase from our other stores. Links – 8 Ounce Candy on Amazon, 16 Ounce Candy on Amazon

We’ve also added our bulk sugar listing to Amazon/eBay/Walmart. While we can charge a lower price on our website since we’re not paying commission, this should open up doors to new customers who would have never found us before. Repeat bulk customers are a growing part of our business and we love to see all of the cool products people are making with our ingredients!