BELFAST, Maine — Maple syrup is big business in Maine, generating an estimated annual revenue of $27.7 million — but it’s also a backyard enterprise that many Mainers still claim as their birthright.
Turning clear maple sap into sweet, amber syrup is a spring activity practiced in the northeast since prehistoric times. Today, it’s done by enterprising Mainers such as Sasha Kutsy and her daughter, 11-year-old Mirabelle Kutsy-Durbin, who bundled up on a blustery March day to check the taps they have put into a few of the stately sugar maples that tower over their residential Belfast neighborhood.
The duo pulled a green garden cart with a big, empty water jug, which they emptied the metal sap pails into. They then brought their harvest back to their low-tech boiling operation. Inside an outbuilding, Kutsy fed scrap wood into an old cookstove. On top of it, sap simmered fragrantly in a metal pan, and Mirabelle carefully filled a mug and sipped the warm, tasty liquid.
“It tastes so much better,” she said of the maple syrup her family makes every year. “It tastes so different.”
Sasha Kutsy, her partner Mark Durbin and their two children, Mirabelle and 7-year-old Simon, work together as a family to get the job done. With only eight taps drilled into four of the old sugar maple trees in their neighborhood, they make between one and two gallons of maple syrup annually. The trees are not on their land, so they ask permission from the landowners before tapping the maples, and then host a community meal to share some of the finished product with their neighbors when the season is over.
The family began making sap when they lived in a rural homestead they had built in the town of Washington.
“It was really lovely, but isolating,” Sasha Kutsy said. “We discovered we needed a little more of a social outlet.”
And so five years ago, they moved to a house at the end of a dead-end road in the downtown portion of Belfast.
“The bad thing is that there isn’t much nature around,” Mirabelle said.
It’s true that the family has exchanged acres of undeveloped land for streets, sidewalks and houses, but have found pockets of nature where they can. Instead of a front lawn, they have a vegetable garden, and have planted grapes, mulberries, raspberries and more on their property since moving in. For two years they even had Penny, the city’s only known in-town cow, but after a rough experience milking her they decided to give her to a different farm and get Nigerian dwarf goats instead. Right now, the goats — Sabrina and Iris — are just pets, but after they have kids next spring the family will start milking them.
“Because we homeschool, we try to make our home as rich as possible in experiences,” Sasha Kutsy said.
Even so, making maple syrup is special. Kutsy was born in the Ukraine and remembers tapping birch trees to drink the sap when she would go on excursions in the countryside. Later, her family moved to the U.S. and lived in Massachusetts. As an adult, Kutsy worked for a time as an environmental educator in Florida, but decided to move closer to her family.
“[Massachusetts] wasn’t what I was looking for,” she said. “And I was pleasantly surprised by Maine.”
She appreciates taking part in some of the state’s long-standing traditions, especially making maple syrup. They found the old-fashioned metal pails they use for sale on Craigslist and got the woodstove from a neighbor who wanted to get rid of his. The wood scraps they burn are leftover from Durbin’s work as a builder, and would otherwise have landed in a dumpster.
“This is probably the most efficient sap operation you’ll come across,” Kutsy said.
Beginning in January, they track the daily highs and lows of the temperature and when the conditions seem right, drill the holes and place their taps.
“It was a fun tradition to continue,” she said. “As February rolls around and we are so eager for spring to come, this is a sign that it’s on its way.”
The finished product is a hit in their home, and is usually gobbled up long before it’s time to make another batch. But that’s okay with Kutsy and her family, who aren’t striving to live off their land as much as learn from it.
“For me, this is more about homeschooling than homesteading,” she said. “And none of it is necessary, but it’s so nice for the soul.”