How long have you been tapping maple trees? 

It corresponds pretty well with how long we've (Stephan and her husband, Howie) been at Greenmarket-- since 1986. We're going into our 27th season of selling new syrup at the market. The first market we ever did was Union Square Friday. That first year, we just sold for a few weeks in the spring. We didn't know how we'd do at the market, but we expanded our season over the next few years, and then it became a year-round business. We've been there on Fridays ever

Over 5,000 taps. We've done some expansion this year, and we've taken on a new sugar bush just up the hill from us. It's on the same hill our bush lies across, and it's a beautiful piece of land which belongs to a friend and neighbor.

When we first started, we sugared from a sleigh pulled by horses, and collected the syrup in buckets. The next year we bought the piece of land we now call Deep Mountain, and we eventually switched over to tubing, because with thousands of taps to collect from, to try and run an efficient business on the sled...it was impossible to keep up with production. 

Sugaring-you either love it or you don't. You get real connected to the change of seasons this time of year. And you go kind of crazy-the sap is controlling our lives right now! You get all the taps set up, and then you just wait. The thing is, sap is really unstable. As soon as it comes out of the trees, microorganisms will start breaking it down so you want to boil it as soon as possible.

Tapping is the process of putting a hole in tree with a spout, attached to a tube. Sap runs through the tubing into yet a bigger tube, and then an even bigger tube (the mainline) which runs to the sugar house where the sap empties into thousand-gallon tanks. The tubing is just 1.5 inches wide, so I always tell people it's like you're plumbing the woods. 

In the sugar house, the sap boils down in two pans which are six feet wide by 16 feet long. They rest on a framework called an arch which is centered around a wood fire.You want to boil the sap as hot and as fast as you can. 

It takes about 40-60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The whole process is just simple

reduction, reducing sap to concentrate. The specific density of the syrup is measured with hydrometer.