Everyone Has Their Own Opinion…
Trying to predict Mother Nature is like trying to predict the election; the Farmer's Almanac has been making predictions since 1792! On the weather, not the election. Needless to say, everyone has a guess, but you can’t heat the house, or boil the sap with guesses, so we’ll plan for the worst and hope for the best, as they say, regardless of what everyone’s saying.
A year ago around this time, people were asking the same age-old question… “What kind of winter do you think we’ll have?” Well, I can tell you now: It was cold. It was cold, and we didn’t have a lot of snow. Without the snow to insulate the trees, many thought that it would be a terrible season for sugaring, but they were wrong. Turns out, a lot of sugarmakers had their best year ever! It took a while for the trees to come into it, as those cold days dug in their heels and stuck around for a while, but once they did, that sap ran to beat the band, and it kept on running.
Elections come around every four years, presidential elections anyway, and with them the requisite pundits, polls, and predictions; and everyone thinks they’ve finally figured it out this time. Winter and sugaring season, on the other hand, comes around every year, and every year people run around bandying their best guesses and deepest desires (folks around here are really hoping for a ton of snow this winter… and from what we’re hearing, we just might get it!)
Everyone’s got an opinion on just what kind of winter Mother Nature’s got in store for us; they pile up quicker than wood in the woodshed. But you see, we’ll stock the woodshed clear to the rafters regardless of what the amateur and professional meteorologists among us think, and we’ll be ready for the sap-run of the century should it come. I can tell this, whether we’re measuring in inches or feet a few months from now, when those cold nights tiptoe into warmer days under spring sunshine, those maples will start run, and we’ll fire up the sugarhouse to the sweet smell of boiling sap, and that’s regardless of any opinion you might hear at the general store plunked down on the counter like it was a fact in the waning days of Summer.
