HUNTINGTON – Steven Boisseau was out in a t-shirt checking his maple sugar taps on Route 66 in Huntington on Thursday. Boisseau, who owns the Boisseau Family Sugar House on Goss Hill Road, has 1,300 taps all over Huntington but he said, he isn’t tapping yet.
“I’m just fixing anything damaged by squirrels and fallen limbs, so I’ll be ready to go when the weather breaks,” he said.
Boisseau said it is a lot easier tapping the trees without 3-4 feet of snow on the ground.
“The last few years it’s been on snowshoes and terrible,” he said.
Last year was a good year for maple syrup, though. This year, there’s an inch of mud on top of the frost in the ground, and it’s slippery. He doesn’t think the frost is very deep. He said he never remembers not having at least some snow on the ground.
“If we get some snow, it’ll hold the frost in the ground, which may help the season a little bit,” he said Thursday.
Usually, the sap starts running around the first day of March. If the weather seems like it is going to warm up sooner than that, he’ll probably tap a little bit earlier.
He said nobody knows what this season will bring, or if they do, they know more than him.
“I’ll let you know around the first of April,” Boisseau said.
