When the sap starts running, Rock Forest starts jumping. This winter’s unseasonably warm weather kicked off the sugaring operation around Valentine’s Day, earlier than usual, but the Gardiner forest farm follows Mother Nature's lead.
“It takes a lot of sap to boil down to make syrup,” explains Christina Liakos, who runs Rock Forest with her partner, Basil Tsimoyianis. It generally takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. With a two-person operation, that’s a lot of work to make the 18 to 20 gallons that Rock Forest plans to sell this year. But a little syrup goes a long way. The farm sells bottles from 3.4 ounces to a half quart at the forest farm on Millbrook Mountain. They can also be seen selling their wares from a truck near Lombardi’s Restaurant.
“People can come to the land and learn some skills.”
“We’re like a neighborhood CSA,” Christina says of her farm’s place in community supported agriculture. “We do a lot of fairs in Gardiner and surrounding towns. We offer workshops. People can come to the land and learn some skills.”
Rock Forest has maple workshops starting in March—and don’t forget the GAB mixer and a close-up look at the sugaring process at the farm on Thursday, March 9. It is a chance to see how everything operates, chat around a crackling fire, and try some tasty treats.
But catching delectable gold lightning in a bottle lasts just a few fleeting weeks. Rock Forest hosts other workshops about mushroom cultivation. www.rockforestny.com boasts “the best shiitake in the Hudson Valley.” Come fall they plan to host Acorn Fest. “We use the taste and textures of season,” said Basil.
Besides mushrooms and maple syrup, the couple—plus two-year-old Melia—stay plenty busy. They also handle bee relocation as part of their wild honey business and operate a portable saw mill using fallen timber from their 52-acre spot in Gardiner.
Avid rock climbers, one of the reasons they settled in this part of the Hudson Valley is the Shawangunks. It is also centrally located between grandparents: his in Connecticut and hers in New Hampshire.
Christina and Basil met in Vermont. He was in Burlington at the University of Vermont and she was 70 miles south at Green Mountain College. What brought them together was an environmental advocacy program with Greenpeace and “doing more work off the land,” she says, and they have certainly done so. Basil and Christina have increased their sugaring operation a little more each year.
“We use the taste and textures of the season.”
Basil is a rope technician, archivist, and photographer for the aerial dance company Bandaloop, literally helping them dance on walls. He recently was part of a performance in Phoenix prior to Super Bowl LVII. Christina has worked with environmental and climate justice organizations the past 15 years, including a decade spent working with Indigenous tribes and communities in Alaska. When all is right with the world, they work with the same clients. But the hope is that most of their travel will be checking taps among their many trees in Rock Forest, especially as Melia grows and can do more to help than hand them a single stick of firewood and a smile.
Article by Matthew Silverman
Author of Out of a Dog’s Mouth (under the name McNally Berry),
https://www.outofadogsmouth.com/
Proprietor of Silverman Editing Services
https://www.silvermanediting.com/