Welcome. We are William and Debbie Lacourse. For twenty years we milked cows, and since 1994 we have tapped maple trees instead, about 1,800 of them, on the hill behind the house. We sell our syrup at the farm stand by the road and to a few stores in the area. Our son set this page up for us last winter, and we were told it would be easy. It has been about as easy as sugaring.

We each write some of it. You'll be able to tell who wrote what. -- D.

She means hers are the parts with all the punctuation. -- W.

We milked sixty cows, give or take, from 1974 to 1994. Twice a day, every day, for twenty years. People ask what we miss about it. I miss the cows, some of them. I don't miss four-thirty in the morning on Christmas. I don't miss the milk check either. You can work as hard as you like on a small dairy and the price of milk is still decided by people who have never been in a barn.

We'd always made a little syrup in the spring, like most farms around here. Three hundred buckets on the trees along the road and the edge of the woods, and a small evaporator in a shed my father built. It paid for the taxes some years. By 1994 the cows weren't paying for much of anything, and our backs were telling us things, and we sat down at the kitchen table one night in January and did the arithmetic. The sugarbush had plenty of maples we'd never tapped. Trees don't need milking.

The herd went in the fall of 1994. It was a hard day and I won't pretend otherwise. That winter we put in our first tubing, and the next spring we had a thousand taps. We're up to about 1,800 now, and we built a proper sugarhouse in 1996 with a bigger evaporator, and that's about where we intend to stay. A man of fifty-two who tells you he's going to keep growing is a man who hasn't hauled enough wood.

-- William

Sap runs when the nights freeze and the days thaw. Below freezing at night, forty or so in the daytime, and the trees push sap out of every taphole on the hill. Too cold, nothing. Too warm, and the season's over. Around here that's usually from the end of February into April, but every year is its own year, and the trees don't read the calendar.

We tapped the week of February 20 in snowshoes, with the snow up to our knees in the hollows. Then it stayed cold. Every morning William went out and looked at the thermometer and came back in and said "Nope." He's a man of few words, and in late February that's most of them. The first real run came on the third of March, and we fired the evaporator for the first time on Thursday the fourth. There's no smell like the first boil of the year. You can smell it at the bottom of the road.

The big run started on the twenty-second of March. Hard freezes at night, sunny and near fifty in the day, three days running, and the tanks filled faster than we could boil. We boiled thirty-one hours in three days. I brought supper down to the sugarhouse on a tray and William ate it standing up, stoking the arch every few minutes in between bites. We made 135 gallons in those three days, and I believe we slept about eleven hours between us.

The weather turned warm the second week of April, the buds started to swell, and the last of the syrup began to taste the way it does when the trees are done. We boiled for the last time on the fourteenth and pulled the taps that Saturday. Four hundred and fifty-five gallons, a little better than a quarter gallon a tap. A decent year. Not our best, not our worst. We don't brag in Vermont, and we don't complain, much.

How it graded out:

Fancy is the lightest, the delicate one, and it mostly comes early in the season. The syrup gets darker and stronger as the spring goes on, and Grade B is the darkest, the one for cooking. Medium Amber sells best at the stand. Dark Amber is what we put on our own pancakes. Grade B goes in the baked beans and in William's coffee, which I don't recommend to anybody.

-- Debbie

People think a sugarmaker works six weeks a year. A sugarmaker works six weeks a year at a dead run and the other forty-six getting ready for it.

Wood. The evaporator burns about eighteen cords of hardwood a season, and it has to be dry, which means it has to be cut a year ahead. So every fall we cut next spring's wood plus a little, and stack it in the woodshed and under cover along the sugarhouse. We cut mostly what's blown down or crowding the maples, and the beech and the poor trees, so the sugarbush gets better while the woodshed gets fuller. I have been told that this is called forest management. I call it October.

The lines. There's something like seven miles of tubing on the hill, from the little lines that run tree to tree down to the mainlines that carry the sap to the tanks. Every fall we walk all of it. We look for limbs down on the lines, sags, leaks, posts that have heaved, and the places the deer have walked through and pulled a line loose.

The squirrels. Here is where I could go on. The red squirrels on this hill chew our tubing. Not to get anywhere. Not to get anything. They just chew it, because it's there and they have teeth. I have walked the lines in October and found a stretch of mainline with nine holes in forty feet. Every hole is a leak, and every leak is sap on the ground next March instead of in the tank. We splice them, one at a time, with a little connector and a cold thumb. Debbie says I talk to the squirrels while I do it. That's a lie. I talk about the squirrels, to myself. There's a difference.

Everything else. Washing the tanks. Checking the pans. Fixing the sugarhouse door, which sticks. Ordering jugs. Not fixing the sugarhouse door, which sticks.

-- William

Then the leaves turn, and everybody comes. The swamp maples down by the brook have gone red already, and the sugar maples on the hill will be at their best in a week or two, if the weather holds. From the end of September through Columbus Day weekend, the road out front has more traffic than it gets the rest of the year put together, and the farm stand does a good share of its year's business.

We like the visitors. We do. Some of the questions we get asked every year, with our answers:

The stand is open weekends through foliage, and most weekdays when one of us is home. There's maple candy and maple cream, and Debbie's maple walnut cookies, which go by noon on a Saturday. If nobody's there, there's a coffee can and an honor system, and in five years the coffee can has never come up short. People are better than the news says.

-- Debbie

We have two, both grown, both raised in a barn and neither one interested in cows, which in the end was part of the arithmetic too.

Kristy is twenty-seven. She's a nurse in Burlington, married to Lee Waltman, who is a very nice man from Connecticut who had never seen a sugarhouse until he came courting in March of 1996 and William put him to work stacking wood. He married her anyway. They're expecting our first grandchild in March, right in the middle of sugaring, which Kristy says she planned so her father would have to stop boiling for at least one afternoon. We'll see.

James is twenty-six. He works with computers for a company in the city and comes home most weekends in March to boil, because he says nothing at his job is as satisfying as drawing off syrup. He put this page together for us. If something on it doesn't work, it's his fault. He says to tell you that.

-- Debbie

The grandchild is due in March. The sap is due in March. I can do two things at once. -- W.

He can't. -- D.