Meet a Sugar Maker: Chaska Richardson & Matt Menard

Tell us the story of couching lion

Couching Lion Maple Sugar farm is located on the Western facing slope of the Green Mountains. When hiking to the top of our sugarbush, you have a spectacular view of Camel’s Hump, or as explorer Samuel de Champlain called it, “Le Lion Couchant,” or Couching Lion.

Chaska’s grandparents, Jack and Jane Handy, moved to Huntington in 1975. They fell in love with a piece of land at the end of a long, barely passable, dirt road. Family members recall thinking this was a crazy endeavor for two people looking for a place to retire! Jack and Jane would not be dissuaded. They created a beautiful place for family to gather and taught their grandchildren the importance of environmental practices and forest stewardship. Their greatest desire was that the property would be forever protected and loved by their descendants. While many family members enjoy visiting Huntington to hike or ski on the trails, Chaska and Matt chose to make this place their home and continue stewardship of the forest and fields.

In the 1800s much of the property had been cleared for sheep farming and later used for cattle. Within the last 75 years, forest has replaced much of the open land, old stone walls run throughout and remind us of the rich farming history. The sugarbush has remained forested for 120 years. The sugar maples comprise 58 acres within a 162-acre forest. Remnants of two separate sugaring operations exist in the forest. There is an evaporator and sugarhouse from the 1950s as well as the ruins of a much older brick arch dating back at least 100 years. The forest is sustainably managed and enrolled in Vermont’s Current Use Program. The forestry management plan has maintained the old sugarbush, as the Handys always hoped it would be used again.

WHO IS COUCHING LION?

My husband Matt Menard and I moved to Huntington in 2002. Matt built our home near my grandparents' house, and we enjoyed many years of living together. Matt’s family had sugared for many generations, and he hoped to begin the profession as well. With a full-time job as a carpenter, Matt started sugaring on a small scale with buckets. He built a barrel stove and began making small batches of wood-fired syrup. By 2012, the desire to sugar on a larger scale had taken hold. Matt built a sugarhouse and began tapping trees in the old sugarbush. Lines were installed and Couching Lion Maple Sugar Farm was born. Today, the business has more than 2000 taps. I began to manage the sales aspect of the operation and found a passion for business. I also keep very busy with my day job as a teacher in Burlington elementary schools.

WHAT MAKES COUCHING LION SPECIAL?

For me, it’s the connection to the land. It’s the sugarbush - this wonderful place that I grew up skiing and walking around with my grandparents. I just feel honored to still be here and to be able to do something on the land that makes enough money to cover our expense More importantly, it is wonderful to have a place for my nieces and nephews to come visit. I want them to have a chance, like I did, to play and run around in the woods . Beyond that, the sugaring is incredible. The work and product is amazing. When you work hard with the sap, it’s amazing what you get.

We also got into the Bird-Friendly Maple Project early on. I love this, it feels like a special part of the sugaring operation. Finding new buyers has been useful with our bird friend- ly designation as well. We let our customers know that we steward the woods with the idea that we can be farmers and support critical habitat. Being Bird Friendly has also proved to be an avenue to provide maple to schools and educate students on the birds of Vermont.

I see you have a chocolate sauce as one of your products. how did that come about?

We are proud of this chocolate sauce! We have a bird-friendly certification that we wanted to honor in other parts of our business as well. In addition, there’s a lot of syrup in the area so we wanted a special value-added product. We heard of a chocolatier getting his beans from a bird-friendly sanctuary in the Dominican Republic. Matt Birong runs 3 Squares Café in Vergennes and directly sources hand-picked organic cacao from Dominican Republic’s Reserva Zorzal, a 1000+ acre bird sanctuary! The Vermont Center for Ecostudies told us we have a very special Bicknell’s Thrush in our area that winters in the same area as that bird sanctuary.

Tell me about your kiosk in the field, and what makes it a success.

We opened the Maple Kiosk during the spring of 2020 when Vermont was in COVID lockdown. I wanted to create a safe way for customers to pick up maple. I sell a lot of syrup in person at my job in Burlington and to customers in the area. Knowing we wouldn’t be able to do that for a while, it seemed like a good way to maintain a connection with customers. As that spring stretched out it became clear that people really needed opportunities to get out of the house and enjoy a beautiful quiet spot. This led to the creation of our field loop mowed path through the field that offers views of General Stark Mountain, Hinesburg Hollow and the Adirondacks.

We are way off the beaten path which makes a visit to the Maple Kiosk a fun little trip. We have a notebook in the kiosk and love what our visitors have to say. Some favorite snippets are, “This is the most Vermont thing ever,” “Thank you for preserving this beautiful place,” and “We drove across 3 states for this amazing maple syrup." I think people enjoy the honor system at the kiosk. Vermont has maintained a tradition of self-serve farm stands, and there have been very few instances where that trust is violated. We take cash, checks, and Venmo (once people get into cell service range!).

What's it like to juggle your full-time jobs and your business?

This can be really busy! Matt has been able to structure his work around sugaring, logging, firewood and building jobs. The work to be done is non-stop, but he can plan other work around the many jobs needed to get ready for sugaring. I work as a teacher in Burlington and have less flexibility with my schedule but have found ways to weave our business into my day job. It’s been really fun to share my love of the woods and sugar-ing with my students at the Sustainability Academy, a public magnet school in Burlington. Maple is an important part of our school culture and I’ve been lucky to find lots of same-minded colleagues who feel strongly that all Vermont kids should have access to real maple syrup, whether through school lunch (the

BSD purchases and serves our syrup, classroom projects (taste tests, sugar on snow, evaporation experiments, etc.) or as gifts (all 5th graders leave our school with a pint of syrup thanks to the PTO). As for running the business, packing boxes from website orders, canning syrup, making sugar and other value-added products, that is all done on nights, weekends or in the summer.

What are you excited about for the future of couching lion?

We are always thinking about ways to make our systems more efficient. There is potential for more taps so as our systems improve we can continue to grow. We’d like to add some solar panels to offset the cost of electricity which can be pretty substantial. I’d like to expand the tiny kiosk into a small shed. We’re also planting balsams so one day it would be nice to have a larger place to sell both trees and syrup out of. I’m excited about adding more agritourism opportunities. Right now the field loop is about all we have time to maintain with signage and mowing but there are some beautiful trails through the sugarbush that could factor into agritourism in some way. I’m also excited to continue working with Audubon and the Bird-Friendly Maple Project and see where that goes. Also, as people continue to learn about the benefits of maple syrup and maple sugar the potential is limitless for chefs, athletes etc. I’m also excited to see larger systems improve for sugar makers, such as the sugar line recycling idea we talked about, more subsidies and grants for farms and continued support from VMSMA for things like the Maple Meander.

In their maple story, Chaska shared that she and Matt cannot stress enough the important role the Purinton’s, and Purtinton Maple in Huntington, played in their success. “They are always available for myriad questions, they’ll leave supplies after hours and are always willing to help”, she wrote. To Chaska, this sharing of knowledge and time feels like a major tenet of the successful maple industry in Vermont.