Sugaring

Our neighbor Jon Hartland built a sugar house several years ago to boil the sap he collected from his Sugar Maple trees at Lakeview Farm. At the time, Jon was our neighbor and Phil and Jon started up a small sugaring operation. Jon and Phil have been boiling every year since. If your interested in buying locally made, New Hampshire maple syrup, please let us know.

The Sugar Makers

Danielle Mulcahy made a short documentary film featuring Phil and Jon's sugaring operation next door to Lockehaven Farm. You can watch the intro here.

Also, take a look at Danielle's other work.

The sugar bush

Sugar maple are part of our long term plan. For whatever reason, Lockehaven farm doesn't have a huge amount of mature sugar maples. We've taken in upon ourselves to remedy that in hope that in 40 or 50 years, there will be a sustainable and productive sugar bush.

We have also started searching our forest and thinning around the few sugar maples we do have. A sugar maple can tolerate shading from taller trees, but ensuring good access to sunlight is important to ensure the highest quality of mature tree.

A large sugar bush could have up to 2,000 trees and produce anywhere between 4,000 gallons of sap or 40,000 gallons, depending on the tree size, health, and weather. Usually, on an average tree, one can expect about 8 gallons of sap per tree. Depending on the sugar content, it can take about 10 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.

We have a long way to go...

Sweet Birches

You can tap any tree, but the amount and quality of what you get varies. The Sweet birch (Betula lenta) is one tree that can match the Sugar Maple in terms of quality.

While much less common in New England, birch syrup is a staple in places where maple trees don't grow. Alaska and parts of Canada, where birches are a primary tree in the forest, make birch syrup in much the same way New Englanders make maple syrup.

At Lockehaven Farm, we have planted 50 sweet birch saplings. While they grow much faster than sugar maples, the sap they produce has a much lower sugar content, and as such the typical sap to syrup ration (8-10 gallons / quart) doesn't apply. Instead, a sugar maker needs about 50 gallons of birch sap to make a quart of birch syrup.

Sugar maple sap contains succrose, whereas birch sap contains fructose. The different sugar type as well as natural oils that differ between the trees is what gives birch syrup its distinct flavor. To learn more about birch syrup, take a look at the folks who do it best.