A mild winter across North America may be prompting some concerns about the maple syrup season this year, but there is still plenty of time for the weather to turn around and produce a bumper crop. That was the message delivered as part of the Waterloo-Wellington Maple Syrup Producers Association’s annual first-tap ceremony on Feb. 24 at the farm of Dale Martin, just west of Elmira. “The winter’s not as important as the next four- to six-week period,” said Martin as he stood inside his new sugar shack behind his dairy farm on Balsam Grove Road.
The farm has been in the family for nearly 100 years after his grandfather, Moses, settled in the area, and the maple trees on the property have been producing syrup off-and-on for pretty well that entire time, he said.
Dale has also been in partnership with his cousin, Paul Martin, for the past 19 years, and together they run about 9,000 taps on 90 acres of bush spread out in three different counties. Last year they produced about 10,000 litres of finished syrup, and hope for much the same this year.
“Anything more than that is a bonus,” Paul said.
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Yet some producers are concerned that sap production could be down this season after an abnormally warm winter with very little snow cover. They like to see about an inch of snow cover in their sugar bush when they start tapping, along with below-freezing nights and days with temperatures touching four degrees above zero.
This year, though, many syrup-producing areas have seen the sap start to flow a few weeks earlier than usual, raising concerns that if the trees bud too early, the season will be shortened and the sap will either be of a lower grade, or unusable altogether.
Yet the Martins don’t share those concerns. They say that they’ve seen warm winters like this one in the past, and as long as conditions during the six-week window of production are ideal, the season should be a good one.
“I remember one around 30 years ago we were tapping and there was absolutely no snow in the bush,” said Paul. “We were tapping in our shoes, no boots, and we ended up with a decent year.”
For resident maple syrup historian Albert Martin, it’s often best to take a wait-and-see approach at the start of maple syrup season rather than start worrying right away.
“It just depends now what the weather will do,” he said, adding that his father always said the last Friday of every month often served as a good barometer for how the next month will unfold, and that the few inches of snow and cooler temperatures the region experienced the night before the tapping ceremony should be a good omen for the rest of the season.
“I’ll give you one example,” Albert said. “It was 1957 and the weather was warm and mild in March, and the sap wouldn’t run. At the end of the week we got some rain, and then we got some snow and cooler temperatures, and the following week the sap ran like ever.”
The long-term forecast for Waterloo Region should help set producers’ minds at ease, as temperatures for the next ten days are expected to range between -6 at night and +7 during the day – ideal conditions for sap to run.
At the tapping ceremony Feb. 24, Kitchener-Conestoga MP Harold Albrecht had the honour of drilling the inaugural first tap, and as the sap began to drip from the spout, Paul and Dale were busy preparing their brand new evaporator for its first boil of the season.
“It’s a real adrenaline rush when that sap starts coming and you start boiling,” Dale laughed.
