Ever wonder what goes on inside a sugarhouse — one of those small, weathered-barnboard buildings with a cupola on top, sometimes with a cord or two of firewood in the lean-to, often emitting a steady stream of smoke and steam during the months of March and April?  Here’s an opportunity to find out.  

The Andover Institute, an arm of the Andover (NH) Community Association, will offer a  guided tour of the sugarhouse at Ragged View Farm on Saturday, March 17, beginning at 10 a.m., at the farm location at 111 Bradley Lake Road in Andover.  The tour is free and open to the public.
Led by owner and proprietor Mark Cowdrey, the tour is the latest in a continuing series of Institute “space explorations,” designed to introduce local residents to venues more or less “off the beaten path” for many. Participants may drive to the farm on their own or join in carpooling from the Andover Town Office Building parking lot at 9:45 AM.
For the uninitiated, a sugarhouse is where maple syrup comes from.  Cowdrey explains what visitors to his sugarhouse on March 17 could observe:
“First, we’ll need  raw sap, which we collect from local sugar-maple trees in those buckets and taps you often see this time of year.  The ideal weather for that to occur is clear warm days of about 40 degrees, following freezing nights of about 25.    

“When we get a good run of sap into the buckets, we’ll have 500 or so gallons of raw sap. We then fire up a big pan called an evaporator and cook the sap down from 2% sugar to 66% sugar.  After that, the syrup is drawn off,  filtered, bottled, and distributed.”
And what will happen if the weather is too cold for sap collection?  “Guess we’ll just talk through the process and look at the equipment. Maybe we’ll talk about the role of sugaring in our local community and economy. Whether we boil that day or not, we can sample the product.”
And if you can’t attend the March 17 visit to Ragged View Farm, Cowdrey notes that the following weekend — Saturday and Sunday, March 24-25  — will be the 23rd annual NH Maple Weekend, with many sugarhouses across the state — including Cowdrey’s  — opening their doors to all comers.  For a list of participants, go to nhmapleproducers.com.
Now, in its fourth year, the Andover Institute has offered nearly two dozen “space explorations” to date, including hikes to local water bodies not visible from public roads, a visit to a heron rookery, walking tours of an alpaca farm and a 250 year-old farmhouse, visits to a museum of automobile memorabilia and a “nanobrewery,” and a tour of the city of Franklin.  To receive alerts of future events, send an email to andovercommunity03216@nullgmail.com.