JAY — The season is starting a bit slower than last year, but trees are being tapped in anticipation of an early sign of spring — maple syrup season.

Tony Couture of Maple Valley Farms has just finished putting in 2,000 taps on maples on the 80 acres of property on Route 133 where his father began tapping in 1964.

Couture boiled a little sap this week, but the days are a still a bit too cold, he said. The normal four- to six-week-season will probably start next week. There needs to be daytime temperatures around 40 degrees to start the sap running, he said. Thursday’s temperatures didn’t produce as he had hoped.

Gone are the days when he and five siblings would come home from school to gather buckets of sweet sap for his father, Placide Couture, to boil down in a small shed in the woods. The 1,100 buckets his father used produced about 120 gallons a season.

In 2003, just a few years before his father’s death, Couture modernized the system by building a large, two-story sap house next to the family farm. A new vacuum system with 38,000 feet of tubing running tree-to-tree now brings the sap from the tree taps into a 200-gallon tank in a pump house behind the sap house.

From there, the sap travels through 800 feet of underground tubing to a 1,600-gallon tank on the second floor of the sap house, where gravity then feeds it down into the large stainless steel sap boiler on the main floor.

Couture transported the equipment from Canada himself. Starting in June 2002, he and family members worked steadily, sometimes seven days a week, to get the building and equipment up and running for the next maple syrup season in 2003.

What did his father think about the expansion of his work over the years?

“He loved it,” Couture said. “He was part of the reason I did it, so he could enjoy it before his death three years ago.”

Tapping the same trees but in different places each year aids the vacuum system in being about 30 to 50 percent more productive, he said. Last year was a banner year, with about 550 gallons of syrup produced. Of course, that means a lot more sap with a ratio of 40 gallons of sap producing one gallon of syrup.

The sap needs to be boiled down as soon as it comes out of the trees, he said. That makes the best syrup. If it sets a day in warmer temperatures, it can spoil, he said. Late nights can be the norm as some days he boils down from five to 58 gallons of sap.

Last year Couture started sapping around Feb. 17,  but temperatures were better. He predicts the colder spring temperatures this year may extend the season into April.

The family, including his brother Arnold who helps with production, participates in Maine Maple Sunday, the fourth Sunday of March, sells syrup and produces maple syrup candies for weddings and Christmas, he said.  

Couture remembers moving from tree to tree gathering sap buckets after school and thinking one day he’d inherit the desire to continue the annual process.

“It’s in the blood,” he said.

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