Syrup making doesn’t start at the stove or the sugar shack—it starts long before the first drop of sap ever flows. At Sycamore Tree Farm, the work behind our small-batch maple syrup, black walnut syrup, and sycamore syrup  begins weeks before the season even starts. For the last few years, we only tapped a small number of trees for our own use, but this year we decided to go all in and tap as many trees as we could responsibly manage. We focused first on a beautiful knoll on