Making Maple Syrup
Spring 2009
Where did it all begin? The bucket and tap we'd bought several years ago with the half-hearted thought that maybe one day we'd tap our own trees? But sugar maples don't generally grow in wet areas like our property and so the bucket sat unused in the basement. Then Sammy came home from the library one day with a book about maple season at the Brockwell farm. The book was very detailed about how maple syrup is made. Right down to the temperature at which the syrup is done... 217F. And it had another little fact in it... you don't need sugar maples to get sap. Although generally preferred, other maples like red and black maples will also do the trick.
We were out geocaching one day when we discovered some drinking bottles collecting sap from some trees next to the sidewalk, and at another location, sap from some manitoba maples was being collected in coffee cans. Huh!
Maybe the final push came when we went to the sugar bush in Morrisburg where the buckets were hung, but the sugar shack was closed. How sad our kids wouldn't get to witness the making of maple syrup this year. No, that just wouldn't do. A little bit of internet research provided all sorts of recommendations from families who had gone before us in this adventure of home made maple syrup production - something to "keep the kids amused over March break".
And so it began. One evening we went out and tapped a tree. For 4 days we let the sap run and each day we got a bucket full. Apparently sap can spoil if not kept cool and since the weather had gotten pretty warm, we ended up freezing the sap. Then on the Saturday after lunch we started up the fire in the backyard and started boiling down the sap. A little after midnight we finally finished and our 4 buckets of sap had turned into a small jug of beautiful golden syrup... the best syrup we've ever tasted.
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