It is sap-running time on the Vineyard, and Simon J. Athearn of Edgartown already is in the thick of making maple syrup.

His own topping for home-cooked waffles and pancakes can’t be found in any store. But there is an ample supply for those lucky enough to join him and his wife, Catherine, for breakfast.

Mr. Athearn, 31, said he usually makes close to a gallon of maple syrup and gives it out to family and friends. None of it is for sale.

“I eat a lot of waffles,” he said. “I went to a dinner party recently and I brought a maple cheese cake. It was good. It had a strong maple flavor.”

Mr. Athearn said that the flavor of his syrup can vary, and he is not certain why.

“I have my own flavor,” he said. “Maybe sometimes I may overboil it. At times it can taste toasty.” The color changes for the syrup depending on when it was prepared, light early, dark later. “Earlier sap runs are clearer,” he said.

Mr. Athearn gathers the sap from 10 tall ancient Norway maple trees at the family homestead off the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road, once the home of his grandmother Ruth Galley.

Norway maple is a common maple tree for the Vineyard. The family also has property in Chilmark. “Up-Island, up in Chilmark we have a lot of swamp maple. A swamp maple tree makes more sap than the the Norway tree,” he said.

Mr. Athearn’s parents, Jim and Debbie Athearn, run Morning Glory Farm. Making maple syrup at this time of year is part of a long-held family tradition. Mr. Athearn’s family goes back 12 generations on the Island and a lot of them were farmers.

“I remember it was an adventure for us kids, to go Up-Island. Dad, my brother Daniel and I, we’d walk into a grove,” he said. He said he was around ten to twelve years old. They helped their father harvest the sap from the trees.

The buckets were heavy, so sometimes they would stay in the woods. “A few times we’d boil up the sap there,” he said. “We’d set a fire. There’d be snow around us. Dad would take a big roasting pan, one with a lot of surface area.

“He would capture several days of sap in the bucket and then on a weekend we would work together,” Mr. Athearn said.

The work was pretty much an afternoon event. “We’d carry the buckets back to the truck, usually by the time the sun was setting. We never finished boiling it down there,” he said. “We’d finish the boiling back at home. It was a long process.

“There is a lot of boiling to do,” Mr. Athearn said.

It takes about 45 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

When Mr. Athearn grew up he left the Island for a time to go to school. But when he came back, in the winter of 2001-2002, he got back to sugaring.

“I was living in Chilmark,” he said. “I began tapping again and got help from my wife. She would watch the pot boiling and I would do the grunt work, carry the sap up the hill. She would make sure I didn’t burn it. That was our first winter.

“Most years I usually end up with close to a gallon: three quarts, five quarts. We are limited by the number of buckets I have, not by the number of trees. I only have ten buckets.”

“I don’t have a very sophisticated boiler, so it takes longer,” Mr. Athearn said.

In the true spirit of a farmer, and a New England farmer at that, Mr. Athearn said there is pleasure in being able to bring about something from nothing. The trees produce the sap, it is just there for the taking. He said he gets free firewood from Tom Turner, who runs a small saw mill in town.

The time to harvest is from mid-February to mid-March, when the spring sap is flowing: “The best flow is from three to five weeks long.”

Temperature is a big factor. Mr. Athearn said the flow is best when the nights go below freezing and the daytime reaches the low 40s to high 30s.

“When you see that, the sap runs hard,” he said. “But when the night temperature gets above freezing, it seems to shut off. If you don’t get that change, you don’t get the flow.”

Boiling sap down to the syrup isn’t complicated, but there are key parts. Do the cooking outdoors. And keep the floating ash out of the syrup.

“When we were kids we had ashes flying into the syrup, and that would get annoying,” he said. “We’ve gotten a little better now.”

Water boils at 212 degrees. When the syrup boils at 219 degrees it is done.

Mr. Athearn advises against boiling the syrup in the house. There is too much humidity. You can take the wallpaper off the wall with all that moisture in the air.

Mr. Athearn also has no interest in exploring putting a commercial value on the work he does.

Most of the joy of making maple syrup comes with the changing season. Making maple syrup takes place about the same time that the Athearns order seeds from the seed catalogs. Mr. Athearn’s brother Daniel and his cousin Brian Athearn are all making maple syrup now.

“It is about the same time we plant the early greenhouse tomatoes,” he said. “The two go together.”

As a farmer, Mr. Athearn said: “This is fun. There are only a few things you can harvest in the winter.”