Our earliest start ever and a very good season for us! Spring has arrived in the maple woods and we are now busy cleaning up. The tasks involved seem more pleasant when we’ve had a good production year! It’s also a special time in the forest as wildflowers and spring plants are emerging and birds and mammals are returning to their summer habitats. We have changed our store opening to summer hours as well.  We are open on Saturdays from 10 to 2 for farm visits and purchases.  We continue our on-line sales, customer pick-ups, shipping and regular deliveries of course.  Customers ..read more

We are getting ready to wind down, but will be open for the Annual Maple Weekend event Saturday, April 6 and Sunday April, 7, from 10 to 4 both days. (Please note that our store will be closed on Monday, April 8th due to the eclipse.) We will not be making syrup this weekend, but our farm will be open to visitors to tour our operations, explore our trails, taste our products and enjoy maple taffy.  The Kettle Boys and Shanty Men are finished for the season as well. The Production Season is Over Sap flow has been declining and the syrup developed “off flavours” this week so our production ..read more

Now that the cold spell is over and the weather has warmed up, the sap is running again – and so are we! The farm is open from 10 to 4 daily throughout the Easter weekend. If you would like to visit the Kettle Boys and Shanty Men, you should plan to come this weekend. Given our levels of production and the quality of the syrup we’ve made, we’re having a good season. We had a terrific haul of sap on March 26th and 27th prompting our first all night session of the 2024 season.  We are hopeful that the sap will continue to run and yield palatable syrup. There was a lot of interest this wee ..read more

We have been busy at the farm making syrup and entertaining visitors! We are open daily from 10 to 4 and in full operation on weekends. Our walking trails are open, the Kettle Boys and Shantymen are here and we have plenty of fresh maple product in the store. There is no snow left in the woods and our trails are in good shape. There is a little mud here and there, so dress for the outdoors and wear waterproof footwear when you visit. The hard runs of sap that we had early last week were followed by steady flows through the weekend and we made lots of syrup. We have been producing dar ..read more

The 2024 production season has started, our earliest ever! We’ll be opening our store and trails Saturday, March 2nd. We made some syrup last week, but the warm weather this week triggered good runs of sap throughout the day and night.  We made very nice syrup in golden and amber grades.  The sap stopped when the temperatures dropped below freezing and the trees are now re-charging so the sap will run well when it warms up again this weekend. The mechanism of sap flow has been studied.  The maple tree has unique cell structure from the roots to the branch tips which enable the f ..read more

The decision of when to start tapping can be difficult.  Ideally, we would like to tap our trees a week before the first runs of sap.  If we tap too early, there is a risk that the tap holes will “dry out” and sap yield will decline prematurely – meaning we lose syrup production at the end of the season.  Tap too late, and we miss the first strong runs of sap and we lose production at the beginning of the season. Over the years, the date of our first boiling is occurring earlier in the year.  So, we watch the weather forecasts closely and tapping in the last week of Februar ..read more

Things are happening at Fortune Farms!  We’ve had a busy off season in the woods cleaning up and managing our forests. We concentrate our forestry efforts on one section of our forest at a time, and then take the opportunity to replace the pipeline systems in the same area. This rotation enables us to maintain the health and vigour of our sugar bush and the integrity of our collection systems.  This is a lot of work but the results are impressive over time as the forest responds with the next generations of seedlings and improved growth rates.  With El Nino parked off the west c ..read more

Our 50th production season has come to an end and we are pleased to report that we had a good year.  The volume of our crop was above our long-term average and the quality is excellent.  We did not make as much dark and very dark syrup as we wanted, but that is beyond our control. The unseasonably hot weather brought the trees out of dormancy very quickly, changing the chemistry of the sap and rendering it unusable. It was a challenging season in the woods dealing with the effects of last summer’s derecho and then the ice storm in April.  This is the fist time we have experience ..read more

It’s been a very busy time at the Farm!  It took us four days to clear trees and branches and repair our pipeline networks following the ice storm.  We missed a couple of days of production as we were without hydro, however, we had lots of visitors at the Farm over the Easter and it seems that a good time was had by all.  The warm weather has reduced the flow of sap. It is still running this morning, April 12.  We expect that the end of the production season is close.   We will make this decision to turn off the pumps and start  clean-up based on the condit ..read more

As I began writing this on Wednesday evening, our power was off and the sound of breaking trees could be heard all around us. I wrote: “Hopefully, the forecast is correct and the temperatures will rise overnight and the ice will melt from the trees.  Our next wish is that our hydro crews are able to work safely and restore our power in the morning as predicted.  We need electricity to run of our equipment, for sap collection to syrup production. “ When the sun came up on Thursday morning, we found a heavy coating of ice on the trees. There were many broken stems and limbs ..read more