Golden-brown maple syrup dribbled down 2-year-old Alexander Jose’s jacket on Sunday morning while he tried to eat vanilla and chocolate ice cream at Hall Farms Maple Products in East Dixfield.
Jose, standing next to his 5-year-old brother, David, held the sticky cup next to his chin to spoon the ice cream in, but kept tilting the cup without realizing it.
Sunday’s sticky sampling during Maine Maple Sunday was Jose’s second time in two days, said dad, Bryan Jose.
“Yesterday was the first time the kids had actually seen it,” said Jose, who with wife, Sara, and children, moved to Readfield from Baton Rouge, La., three days before Hurricane Katrina hit.
“They love maple syrup, don’t you boys?” he asked.
Both children nodded yes without pausing to look up from the ice cream cups.
“We’re trying to go to several today. It’s kind of fun,” said Bryan Jose, who was from Maine originally.
Randy Hall of Hall Farms estimated that 2,500 people would sample syrup at the farm off Route 2.
“We had our best year about three to four years ago on a day like today, with 2,500 to 3,000 people,” he said.
A large wagon filled with hay bales and people, pulled by a red 1954 Farmall H tractor driven by Hall’s son, Kyle Jensen, offloaded people of all ages at the sugar shack.
They were greeted by Hall and his brother Rodney, and glasses-fogging, sauna-like steam rising from the syrup evaporator. Clouds of vapor were thick with the aroma of maple syrup, which some breathed in contentedly.
Just inside the door, Andy and Sue Hogan of Wilton waited with their daughter, Courtney, who was “a little scared of all the steam,” Andy Hogan said.
“It’s really great to see such commerce in Franklin County, because there’s not much left of it. This is quite an operation,” he added.
Randy Hall said his 6-foot-by-14-foot evaporator can boil 36 gallons of sap each hour.
It burns about 36 gallons of oil to make 15 gallons of maple syrup.
“It’s a little sweeter than average,” he said of this year’s taste.
At the JL Dyke Farm on Farrand Hill Road in Hartford, owner John Dyke said he makes eight gallons of syrup an hour in his 5-foot-by-14-foot wood-fired evaporator.
He and wife, Sabrina, estimated that about 1,000 people stopped by on Sunday morning.
“We’ve had a great day,” Sabrina Dyke said late that morning.
Wisps of maple cotton candy clung all over her clothing.
“We’ve been very busy with people just rolling in. I made four pounds of baked beans, and we were sold out in two to three hours,” she said.
“This is our third year doing Maine Maple Sunday, and it’s the biggest one we’ve done so far,” she added.
In Jay, by 12:30 p.m. at Maple Valley Farms Inc., 526 people had been served maple syrup on beans, scrumptious crepes, bacon and hot dogs.
“There’s nothing like hot syrup on crepes,” Irene Couture said, speaking of her husband Tony’s syrup operation.
Inside their sugar shack, it was wall-to-wall people of all ages, with more outside sampling syrup on ice cream and maple syrup taffy in cups set in snow packed into children’s sleds.
They were making four gallons of sap in an hour, and, like the Hall’s syrup, it was a little sweeter this year, Tony Couture said.
For Lucille Richard, 75, of Jay, it was, “Excellent and just right.”
“It’s really good. Everything was good. This is my first time here, but it won’t be my last,” Richard added.
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