Saturday, March 24, 2018, 1:00 p.m. Dave Matt’s Sugar House, Marlboro
This season will be the 38th year that we’ve been sugaring on this farm and like most smaller operations, it’s truly a family operation with my Dad, both my sons, and my grandkids all helping out. As far as I can determine, my sugarhouse is the third one to be built on this property, and over the years we’ve done three major rebuilds as our needs and equipment have changed. We currently set around 1800 taps and make 450 to 500 gallons a year. About 1200 taps run directly to the sugarhouse and are on vacuum. The other 600 taps are gravity lines that empty into 3 separate tanks and are gathered with a 500 gallon tank on a pick-up truck. We do not have a reverse osmosis machine, but we have a 5X16 wood fired evaporator with a steam-away, so boiling gets done relatively quickly. Wood is cut, split, and piled on racks and stored in a shed with greenhouse panels and solar powered fans to heat and move the air so the wood we burn is very dry. The racks are brought to the sugarhouse with forks on a loader and set inside near the arch. We fire right from these racks, making handling as efficient as possible. I hope you can make it on March 24th, I’d love to show you around!
– Dave Matt
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