Why I Stopped Making My Own Maple Syrup

Depending on your perspective, March in New England can be a bleak month, representing the endless drag of winter, or it can be full of possibility as spring starts to emerge. Maple sugaring, which takes place at the end of February/first half of March, can be one of the first tiptoes into the new season. You have to wait until the days are sunny and warm enough so that the sap starts flowing, but the nights still need to remain frigid enough that the tree doesn’t start putting out buds.

In years past, my husband and I thought we had found the perfect way to spend March: we’d tap the maple trees at our house, our parents’ houses, and a couple neighbor’s homes, and spend each weekend boiling the gallons of sap into syrup. It was only about a dozen taps, so not a huge operation by any stretch of the imagination. This was just something fun for us to do together, as people who already love gardening and being outdoors. We’d spend our days in lawn chairs by our outdoor fireplace, boiling the sap down over a wood fire. Usually we would have a Vermont beer or two, some books, and a game of canasta to add to the party. It was FUN.

Alas, March 2023 doesn’t have sap boiling on the calendar for our household. Why? I’ll break it down into three main reasons:

We had too much on our plates
We both work from home, owning and growing our own businesses. We have a seven month old and a two-year old, neither of whom are in full-time care. We have a large garden and a house to run, three meals a day to cook, and laundry that piles up. Not to say that we have more on our plates than others, but rather that something needed to be removed and maple syrup didn’t make the cut.

The return on investment was not worth it
In case you’re not familiar, it takes a lot of sap to make syrup - about 40 gallons of sap for one gallon of syrup. At most, we would be getting a little over a gallon of syrup per season. That might sound like a lot, but we eat pancakes/waffles once a week, use it to make granola a couple times a month, and frequently use it as a sugar replacement in cooking and baking. It goes quickly. We were spending at least 50 hours making something that costs about $35. If time is money, that’s seventy cents an hour we were paying ourselves to do this task.

We are not the experts in our field
Nope! We sure aren’t. We’d usually guess/use a meat thermometer/eyeball the color of the boiling bubbles to tell when the syrup was done. We didn’t filter out the syrup sand that is a natural part of the process. I’m sure we didn’t collect or boil in the most efficient way possible. There are plenty of other small, local farmers who do this better that we can support by purchasing syrup through them.

I bet you get where I’m going with this, as I try to bring it back around to nonprofit work:

We all have things on our too-crowded plates that are just not worth it for us to do because someone else can do it better for less money. Is it sometimes fun to do anyway? ABSOLUTELY. I’m not trying to be a sourpuss - we are all absolutely allowed to engage in any activity for the joy of it, even if it can sometimes feel like too much, even if it’s not a sound “investment,” and even if others do it better.

However, sometimes you just have to remove something. For me, this year, that was sugaring. Think about your nonprofit professional life. What is something that stands out as a low-hanging fruit to outsource or cut out altogether? Get in touch and let me know. I’d love to hear, and maybe I can help.

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