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Date: 3/28/2022
BELCHERTOWN – Nate Shattuck spends nearly every day this time of year checking the weather, hoping for cool days and cold nights.
“It needs to be below freezing at night and 35 to 40 degrees during the day. That really gets the sap running,” says Shattuck, who runs Shattuck’s Sugarhouse with his parents on the family farm in Belchertown.
The maple sugaring season runs from mid-February to the beginning of April. With taps in 950 trees, the Shattucks watch the sap flow through 4.5 miles of tubing that runs from the trees to a huge tank near the sugarhouse.
Gone are the days of stepping through the snow and pouring small buckets of sap into bigger ones, and then taking it all back to the shack on a sled. “We use a vacuum system on the tubing to harvest the sap without ever touching it with our hands,” said Shattuck.
It may not be as romantic as collecting sap drip by drip in tin buckets, but it’s more efficient. The Shattucks use a reverse osmosis system to remove much of the water that makes up sap. This shortens the time it takes to boil the sap down to syrup. They also use less wood.
Shattuck says this is shaping up to be an average year for maple syrup production. He expects to boil down between 300 and 400 gallons of syrup. It all comes down to those cool days and cold nights.
“This year it was really cold for a long period of time, then it got warm and stayed warm,” said Shattuck. “When it gets too warm the sap doesn’t run. Mother Nature is kind of a fickle beast, and she dictates what happens. Every year is completely different depending on the weather pattern. Even so, I’m happy with this year.”
Shattuck’s Sugarhouse has now been in the family for two generations. Will and Judi Shattuck founded the business 47 years ago, when Nate was a baby.
“My folks started the year I was born,” he said. “It’s in my blood. For me, it’s the ability to have a farm to table product that people enjoy. It’s an art and a passion of mine to make the best product we absolutely can. I love doing it.”
The Shattucks sell a range of maple products at a 2,500-square-foot roadside stand at 31 Kopec Ave. During the sugaring season, they sell maple syrup in different sizes, maple candy, maple cream and maple cotton candy. The family also sells syrup to local restaurants that use it in their food and drinks.
There is a collective community fascination with boiling sap to syrup. The Shattucks tap into this enthusiasm by offering tours of the sugarhouse when they’re working. No one can predict when they’ll fire up the boiler. It all depends on Mother Nature, and whether the sap is running.
“We can’t post hours because we never know when we’ll be boiling,” says Shattuck.
The vagaries of nature are something the Shattucks can’t avoid and have simply accepted.
“You take the good years with the bad years, and we’re blessed for what we’re able to produce in any given year,” says Shattuck. “That’s the nature of agriculture.”
The best way to know whether they’re working at the sugarhouse and offering tours is to check Shattuck’s Sugarhouse Facebook page, call or text 262-6594, or send an email to shattuckssugarhouse@gmail.com.