OAK HILL FARM, South Hiram, Maine

   Art's son, James, spent a winter with us, and during the early spring, when cabin fever was nearing its peak, he noted that our farm had a substantial number of maple trees. He suggested we tap a few and see if we could make maple syrup. In March 1997 James and Art put out 17 conventional taps and hung milk jugs from them. Sue provided a huge restaurant grade cast iron fry pan and during that season we gathered and boiled down 120 gallons of sap to produce 3 gallons of maple syrup. We also visited some of the maple sugar houses in the area to see how the Big Boys operated.

            One sugarhouse was upgrading their evaporator and, on a handshake, we bought their old unit. In an instant we became the proud owners of a 4' x 12' Leader drop flue evaporator. James could only shake his head and ask whether it was wise to have purchased an evaporator that was capable of producing in an hour what we had labored to do in a season.

            Over the next seven years we designed and constructed a sugarhouse, which is attached to our barn. We did a phenomenal amount of research and acquired the necessary equipment to operate. Bill Mason of W.F. Mason Welding provided us with tig-welded stainless steel equipment, ideas and encouragement. We ran 12,000 feet of 1" main line up the mountain along with enough smaller lateral lines to accommodate 1000 taps. In 2006 we added a vacuum system to the operation. By adding vacuum we are not, as the name implies, sucking the trees dry. We are instead creating an artificial environment within the tubing that will be our hedge against borderline sap-flow days. In 2010 we added a Reverse Osmosis machine. We run sap through the machine and it removes some of the water from the sap (we call that water permeate) and the process concentrates the sugars. This allows us to boil the sap down faster, using less wood for the fire and less boiling time for us.