If you’re driving 55 miles an hour on Route 209 six miles south of Kingston — on that stretch where cornfields roll away to the west and you’re not quite sure whether you’re in Marbletown yet, or still in Hurley — you might not register that the colorful little sign on the east side of the road that says New Beginnings doesn’t announce a preschool or daycare center. The third word on that sign that you didn’t quite have time enough to read is “Farmstead.” It’s a place worth discovering, for sure: a 130-acre former dairy farm that these days is mostly given over to sugarbush. And you’ll have a great excuse to pay a visit the last two weekends in March, when New Beginnings Farmstead offers tours, talks and demonstrations as part of New York State’s Maple Weekend celebrations.
Maple sugaring activity only lasts for a couple of months each year, of course,in late winter when nights are cold, days are a little warmer and the sap is running. Any agritourism-based operation needs to draw on multiple income streams to survive these days. So, 25 acres of New Beginnings are leased by a company called Cypress Creek as home to a solar farm, tucked away at the rear of the property. The O&W Rail Trail passes just behind it. And a beautifully renovated 3,200-square-foot former dairy barn and adjoining patio new serve as a party venue hosting up to ten weddings each summer and autumn. The prospect of getting married in a meadow with a view of the Catskills, followed by a reception in a rustic building surrounded by maple trees in glorious October array, attracts couples from all over the country, according to the farm’s co-owner, Elisa Tinti: “We recently had a destination wedding from Arizona. No one involved lived anywhere around here.”
The first wedding held on the premises, in 2016, was of Elisa and Egidio Tinti themselves, who had purchased the former Generation Farm together the preceding year. Locals will recognize those names from their more visible roles as longtime City of Kingston employees: Elisa is the city clerk, and Egidio the chief of police, who has been with the department since 1992. She’s a Kingston native; he was born in the Bronx, but grew up on a mountaintop in Olive, working for his father’s construction business.
It was the second marriage for both, and they have six kids between them, all now grown; Elisa’s youngest is 17. In 2015 they were engaged and looking for a house to share, convenient to both extended families, with perhaps enough acreage for Elisa to keep bees and Egidio to store heavy equipment. Investing in such a large farm was a stretch, made possible only by the thousand or so maple trees growing there. Egidio had learned to make maple syrup on a much smaller scale from his mother, so they decided to take a leap of faith, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to give up their day jobs to work the land. Renovating the dairy barn, with its floor of compacted manure, to be suitable for a wedding venue took up all their spare time the first year alone. You can read the full account of these early adventures at www.newbeginningsfarmstead.com/our-blog.
While the wedding venue is fully booked a year in advance and their maple and honey products, including the Twisted Trees line of flavored syrups, have been well-received and even won some awards, New Beginnings Farmstead still hasn’t become any sort of cash cow. Luckily, the Tintis both love working hard, and they have a group of eager friends (also colleagues from the city administration) whom they call the A Team, volunteering their time to the enterprise as well. “Nobody’s ‘employed.’ Everybody just comes together,” says Elisa. “We call them farm family.”
On a tour of the farm in late February, HV1 had a chance to chat with Ryan Coon, Kingston’s department of public works superintendent, and Julie Noble, environmental education and sustainability coordinator, who is married to mayor Steve Noble. Coon had his own wedding at the farm in 2016 and is now the guy responsible for stoking the evaporator with downed maple wood to make sap into syrup. “Sugarmaking is a labor of love. There used to be days when we would run the evaporator from 7 or 8 a.m. to 2 or 3 the next morning,” he says. “Once you start to boil, you can’t walk away,” Elisa explains. With a new reverse osmosis machine that pulls water from the sap, she says, “We can now boil 100 gallons per hour.”
This year, the sugarmaking operation continues to be streamlined with slightly more sophisticated technology. On the day of our visit, the A Team was laying out a new “main line” that would transport sap — previously collected in a widespread array of about 40 plastic barrels that needed daily emptying by a truck with a pump — directly to a second 500-gallon collection tank. “We’re trying to connect everything so that it comes to us. This will be our second vacuum system. It gives us a higher yield, because it actually does suck the sap out of the trees,” Elisa notes. “So far, it has not been a good sap season because it’s been so cold. The flow of sap is weather-dependent. We’ve only boiled once so far. So, we’re taking advantage of the downtime.”
Hopefully, as daytime temperatures creep above freezing, enough sap will flow to provide a nice big batch of syrup in time for the Maple Weekend visitors. Julie Noble, who has many years of experience in environmental education, leads the tours and gives the talks. Groups like My Kingston Kids, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have already booked visits during the weekends of March 22/23 and 29/30. Planned educational activities include a walk through a maple stand, watching the evaporator in action, a trivia game and tree identification. The kids also get to eat hot waffles with syrup, decorate maple cookies and feed the resident sheep, which Elisa describes as “giant dogs” who “mow the lawn for you.”
Besides the prebooked group tours, anyone can just show up on either of the two Maple Weekends from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. to visit the sugar shack, sample a waffle and maybe purchase a bottle of syrup to take home. Admission is free. New Beginnings Farmstead is located at 2585 Route 209 in Marbletown. To book a group visit or a wedding or obtain more information, call (845) 430-8521. You can also order syrups online at www.newbeginningsfarmstead.com/products.
Join the family! 
