Local couple harvests maple syrup

By Taryn Plumb
Turley Publications Reporter

STURBRIDGE – All you see is steam.
It billows, churns, rises up, clouding all visibility.
After a few moments, the lingering haze starts to clear a little, blown around by a biting mid-March wind, and you can make out movement: A white gloved hand, ladling boiling syrup in a stainless steel evaporator in this rustic out-building.
That's John Stevens, owner of Maple Ledge Farm and Sugarhouse, a 35-acre rolling property tucked along the Holland-Sturbridge line on Vinton Road. For more than a decade, John and his wife Debbie have been tapping the sugar maples that line the winding road like giants.
“It's a fun hobby, we enjoy doing it,” John, bundled in a down vest, sweatshirt and smudged white pants, said as he stirred the frothing sap.
With a smile, he added, "It also passes the mud season."
For most of us, March heralds warmer days, shorter sleeves and spring-cleaning.
But for people like the Stevens', the month that comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb means something else: maple sugaring time.
That's when the combination of mild days juxtaposed with cool nights gets the sap flowing, and the couple fires up the evaporator in their backyard sugar house.
They're one of just a half-dozen maple syrup producers in central Massachusetts, generating about 25 gallons a season, as well as maple ale and maple mead, and black raspberry jam and peach butter infused with syrup.
And this year, they'll be bottling up even more: Over the winter, the Stevens' expanded to a much larger, commercial-grade evaporator - and subsequently a bigger sugar house - that they expect will double their output.
Ultimately, it's both a time-honored and time-intensive process.
First, they put about 300 taps into 100 trees along their property, as well as their neighbors' yards (with permission, of course). If you drive along Route 15, you'll see them - large blue barrels with an intaglio of hoses intermingled with smaller, traditional metal buckets protruding from trees.
After sap is gathered, it's dumped into a tank on the outside wall of the sugar house; that then filters to a holding tank on the ceiling inside the building. From there, the sap is gravity-fed to the evaporator: a large, fire-heated, stainless steel device with a long rectangular tub, several holding tanks and tubes.
Then, the syrup boils - at 219 degrees, 7 degrees higher than the temperature required for water to boil. As it churns and swirls, the sap gets denser and heavier, slowly making its way to the front of the tub. Throughout this process, John stirs it and skims off any froth.
Finally, once it crystallizes, "you pretty much know it's syrup," he said.
At that point, it's moved to a finishing pan fueled by a propane tank, where it's filtered and bottled into quarts, pints or glass bottles shaped like maple leafs.
This method produces about a gallon of syrup an hour, John said.
From beginning to end, the entire process takes about six to eight weeks - encompassing February, March and part of April.
But sometimes nature doesn't want to play along.
As was the case this year. Because the weather shifted rapidly from cold to warm, the sap hasn't been as plentiful, John said.
The ideal, as he noted, is warm, sunny days with temperatures 35 to 40 degrees, accented by cool nights with temperatures in the mid 20s.
"That makes the sap flow," he said as he stood in the misty sugar house on a drizzly day, light rain ticking off the roof overhead and gravel crunching beneath his feet.
Occasionally, as he and Debbie tended to the ladling and fire-stoking, the wind barged through, slamming the shed doors open and shut and clearing the lingering fog kicked up by the evaporator.
All the while, Sasha, a Golden Retriever, bundled herself cozily by the stove, or affectionately brushed her damp body or wagging tail against visitors' legs.
As he skimmed the boiling sap, John explained that, considering the time they put into it, they only average about $1 an hour.
So ultimately, it's "a labor of love," he said.
And for him, especially, it's one that's lasted a lifetime.
His grandfather was a farmer in Western Massachusetts, raising milk cows, growing Christmas trees, and - the part John liked best - making maple syrup.
As a child, John would "help out" with the syrup-making process - which, he quipped, his grandfather referred to more as him "getting in the way."
Later, as a teenager, he carried on his family's heritage when he worked at a sugaring house.
Not surprisingly, over the years, syrup has become one of the couples' favored condiments: They sprinkle it into spaghetti sauce, mix it with mayonnaise for a dip for sweet potato fries, baste it onto turkey, or inject it into roasting meat.
"Anything you can use sugar for, you can use maple syrup for," John said.
In the end, it's a hobby that keeps the couple busy - and it also prevents cabin fever as the long winter draws to a close.
"What else are you going to do in the month of March in New England?" said Debbie, who John affectionately calls his "little syruper girl." "It makes the spring come quicker."
For more information on Maple Ledge Farm or to visit, call (508) 347-5558.