Maple syruping in Weston

There are buckets on the maple trees, which means that spring is on her way. Collecting maple sap in Weston starts in the middle of February and runs to the end of March. It’s difficult to determine when to hang the buckets since the sap run is highly dependent on the weather and no year is the same. The sap run comes in several short bursts spread out over the six-week season.

Maple syruping in Weston began as a Green Power Farm project for middle-school aged children to learn the practice: from tapping, collecting, boiling, bottling and selling. Stemming from the social activism and Earth Day environmentalism of the 60s, Weston resident Bill McElwain proposed an idea to utilize suburban land and volunteer labor to grow food. The Green Power program launched in 1970, which is about the same time when the Selectmen appointed a Youth Commission and hired McElwain as a project director. Green Power then became a Town program for young farmhands.

And so, 13-year olds were taken about town to tap the trees and place the buckets. When the sap ran, they crawled over the hills of Weston to retrieve the sloshing buckets and emptied them into a collection tank on a trailer attached to McElwain’s Jeep. The haul was taken to the sugarhouse on the middle school grounds. The rustic board and batten building made of locally milled white pine was built in 1973 and was surrounded by mountainous wood piles and makeshift sap tanks. The young farmhands were encouraged to chop wood, pitch a cord of it into a roaring firebox inside the shack, and tend to the boiling sap in a twin-pan evaporator.

In late March, a sign was placed out by the road that read “Sugar on Snow.” This marked the last boil for the season and a traditional sugaring-off party was held. Here, the kids would make “leather aprons” from thickened syrup poured onto snow or crushed ice for the party-goers who would then buy Weston Maple Syrup.

Green Power and the maple syrup project were incorporated into Land's Sake Farm operations in the early 90s. The program still has middle school aged children tapping, collecting and boiling the sap. During the sugaring off party in March the students conduct tours.