In honor of Maine Maple Sunday, we visited Auger Hill Farm – one of two sugarhouses open today in Washington County. They’re located on Pumpkin Ridge Road. Isn’t that a great address?

Since we’re in our second year of Maple syrup making, we thought it would be fun to see how the professionals do it.

Here, Paul and Hannah study the fancy evaporator for boiling down the sap into syrup – a serious step up from boiling down the sap down over an open fire.

The 2′ x 6′ evaporator is wood fired.

They told us that over the course of the day 300 gallons of syrup would be boiled down to about 8 gallons of syrup.

Outside the sugarhouse this Norway Maple was tapped with an old-fashioned galvanized sap bucket while the remainder of their 1000 trees are tapped with a plastic tubing/pipeline system.

They use ATVs with tanks on the back to collect the sap from collection tanks in the sugar bush.

Seeing this charming little farm in operation had us contemplating an expansion of our miniature Maple syrup operation. Inspired, we returned home and collected the sap from our 12 tapped trees. Gotta think big, right?