MONTAGUE — The Montague Commoners and volunteers gathered Saturday to celebrate the start of the 2025 sugarbush season. With the remaining colder months of winter and early spring approaching, the organization is excited to begin tapping trees for maple syrup again. This started a couple years ago when local environmental activist,Wiley Fry learned about the sugarbush and how to tap. Fry wanted to share this education and how to best utilize the Earth’s natural resources with other White Lake residents, which is when they started Montague Commoners.
“I learned how to tap from my friend, who makes our biochar syrup boiler,” Fry said. “He started a couple years before I did and he taught me. From there, it was a lot of trial and error. The first year I tried it was 2022 and I tapped two trees in my backyard. The first couple years, it was basically a few people coming to my house and we did a boil there. Last year, I noticed there were a ton of maple trees at the campground, so I asked the city and they granted us permission to use the pavilion and tap the trees. We’ve been slowly growing since.”
Montague Commoners now commemorates the sugarbush season with an opening ceremony, where residents are taught and encouraged to tap into their own personal maple trees. Later in the season, all residents are welcome to attend a community boil at the Trailway Campground in Montague. Any participant who brings products from their maple trees or volunteers preparing for the boil are given a portion of the syrup to take home.
“We’ll probably start tapping in the next couple of weeks,” said Fry. “I’m watching the weather. The trick is that you want to wait until it’s consistently above freezing during the day and below freezing at night. That means that the sap is going up and down the tree twice a day, and we get
some while it travels. In the meantime, we’re working on splitting wood to make the biochar. Over the course of the sugarbush season, we’ll probably go through enough wood to fill all of these racks in the pavilion.
“Everybody who comes and helps gets a share of the syrup. We’re expecting to tap 32 trees this year and hopefully get at least five gallons of syrup total. We’ve got some new equipment this year, like a filter that cuts the boiling time in half. We keep scaling up year after year.”
Within the past year, Fry has enjoyed not only watching Montague Commoners grow, but also noticing the varying groups of people it attracts.
“I think we had maybe four of us the first year,” Fry said. “We had almost 20 people on Saturday, so people seem to be very interested once they hear about it. It attracts different kinds of people too, whether it’s elders who remember doing tapping with their families when they were kids or people who want to do more outdoorsy stuff, but aren’t quite sure where to start. It’s a nice entry point for people.”
Fry also enjoys teaching people about natural edible foods that may seem obscure and encouraging people to try new things.
“I learned how to tap from my friend, who makes our biochar syrup boiler,” Fry said. “He started a couple years before I did and he taught me. From there, it was a lot of trial and error. The first year I tried it was 2022 and I tapped two trees in my backyard. The first couple years, it was basically a few people coming to my house and we did a boil there. Last year, I noticed there were a ton of maple trees at the campground, so I asked the city and they granted us permission to use the pavilion and tap the trees. We’ve been slowly growing since.”
Montague Commoners now commemorates the sugarbush season with an opening ceremony, where residents are taught and encouraged to tap into their own personal maple trees. Later in the season, all residents are welcome to attend a community boil at the Trailway Campground in Montague. Any participant who brings products from their maple trees or volunteers preparing for the boil are given a portion of the syrup to take home.
“We’ll probably start tapping in the next couple of weeks,” said Fry. “I’m watching the weather. The trick is that you want to wait until it’s consistently above freezing during the day and below freezing at night. That means that the sap is going up and down the tree twice a day, and we get
some while it travels. In the meantime, we’re working on splitting wood to make the biochar. Over the course of the sugarbush season, we’ll probably go through enough wood to fill all of these racks in the pavilion.
“Everybody who comes and helps gets a share of the syrup. We’re expecting to tap 32 trees this year and hopefully get at least five gallons of syrup total. We’ve got some new equipment this year, like a filter that cuts the boiling time in half. We keep scaling up year after year.”
Within the past year, Fry has enjoyed not only watching Montague Commoners grow, but also noticing the varying groups of people it attracts.
“I think we had maybe four of us the first year,” Fry said. “We had almost 20 people on Saturday, so people seem to be very interested once they hear about it. It attracts different kinds of people too, whether it’s elders who remember doing tapping with their families when they were kids or people who want to do more outdoorsy stuff, but aren’t quite sure where to start. It’s a nice entry point for people.”
Fry also enjoys teaching people about natural edible foods that may seem obscure and encouraging people to try new things.
“We’re surrounded by free food, we just don’t know that it’s food,” said Fry. “Seeing things like the acorns and black walnuts in the fall, people don’t know what to do with them or don’t want to. Maple syrup is a good one to get people started with because they understand where it comes from. It’s a lot harder to encourage other foods, but you show them the cool food combinations like acorn pancakes with natural maple syrup and they start to come around.” Montague Commoners is about not only sugarbush tapping, but also educating people on how to best utilize the nature that surrounds them and how it can better the environment.
“I wanted to show that it was possible,” Fry said. “I wanted to teach that we don’t need some big institution or fund to get stuff done around town. We can just work together and make things like this happen. I do a lot of preparedness work and I worry about supply chains breaking down, agriculture systems breaking down, and I want to do as much as I can to get skills into the community so people would be able to take care of themselves and their communities if things get hard. I wanted to live in a town where this kind of thing happens and the best way to achieve that was to make it happen myself.”
Updates about the sugarbush boil and other activities with Montague Commoners can be found on their Facebook page.
