A string of warm days in early March had new sugar producers Shawn McNamee and Jackie Lamb worried their first season might end before it even began. Luckily, the cold nights returned, and the pair settled in for a marathon run.
This was not their first year collecting sap. In the past, McNamee would work with Matthew Reid during sugar season and in exchange he would boil their sap. “It was always kind of in the plan to eventually go our own way and do it ourselves. And it just happened at the right time that we got this evaporator at auction and Matthew got bigger the exact same year,” he says.
Once equipped with an evaporator, they needed a building. So, the pair set out to convert the original granary at their Butternut Farms location in Godmanchester into a sugar house. It was previously being used as a garage and for storage. They emptied it out and added a new concrete floor in the fall. An area welder and metalworker, Jeff McKellar, then reinforced the century-old structure so tanks could be stored above the main floor.
“We wanted to keep the look, and a new building was more expensive than renovating an old one,” says Lamb.
McNamee admits he thought for months about the logistics of moving the evaporator and installing it. “It took four hours to get that beast in and all the tanks set up,” he says with a laugh, noting the evaporator has wheels and it swiveled right into place. With ten years of experience helping at Reid’s, McNamee was more confident when the time came to fire up the boiler on March 16.
Then came the inconsistent runs, as temperatures swung wildly from highs in the low 20s to freezing cold nights. The tanks would be dry one day and overflowing the next. “It’s a very big swing,” says McNamee, who says the season has gone well despite the starts and stops.
“The machine is a little big for our situation,” he admits, noting they were not able to boil every day because the evaporator outsizes the supply of sap they can pull from their 1,900 taps. There is capacity to increase their taps to a certain extent, which McNamee suggests they will do in the coming years.
“We are happy to keep the trees going,” says Lamb, noting the forest behind the farm was previously cleared and there is a lot of regrowth. “When you’re walking in it, you can see sections that were harvested differently,” she explains, noting there are still some beautiful big trees that were left standing.
The couple, who co-own Lamont Farms, are also sheep farmers, so March is already a busy month. During the first sap run, they were also in the barn with a lambing group of 100 ewes. “We’d see each other for two hours in the morning and two hours at night,” says Lamb. She credits their two children, Isla and Charlie, with being especially patient and supportive. “They helped in the bush doing big days tapping,” she says, noting she would sometimes come in to find supper on the table.
In fact, an entire community sprung up to help make sure this first season went well. As a thank-you, the couple held an open house on April 5, raising a glass to those who made their first season both memorable and successful.