Welcome to the Sugar Shack

With a greeting of “Welcome to the Sugar Shack,” an azure blue sky with an eagle circling overhead, people in brightly colored hats, boots, and fleeces, and acres and acres of woods, I knew we were in for a great afternoon!

The monks of Saint John’s Abbey have been making maple syrup for over sixty years.  After 2500 acres of land were designated a natural arboretum, the first Saint John’s Maple Syrup Festival was held in 2001.  But before you can have syrup, you have to collect the sap!  We joined a hundred other volunteers of all ages for ‘tapping day’ on Sunday.  After a prayer and a song to bless the workers on their way, we headed to the woods.  The ‘sugarbush’ is the stand of sugar maple trees used to collect sap for the maple syrup process.

In our group of ten, including four eager children, we learned how to tap a tree.  We drilled a two-inch deep hole at hip height, making sure not to drill within four inches of an old tap hole.

A metal ‘spile’ was tapped into the hole with a hammer.

We hung a bucket on the spile, put a lid on it, and the tree does the rest!

During winter dormancy, the starch made by photosynthesis the previous year is stored in the roots and trunk of the tree.  When temperatures rise above freezing during the day and fall below freezing during the night, it creates a change in pressure that forces the sap to move up the tree.  The sap is approximately 98% water and 2% sucrose and supplies nutrients for the tree’s new buds.

Other maple tree species (box elder) and other trees (birch) can be tapped for sap, but the sugar maple is the most productive using 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.  The average maple tree will produce 9 to 13 gallons of sap each season.

We tapped trees for two hours in ‘The Hollow,’ one of eleven areas of trees in the sugarbush.

Then we headed back to the Sugar Shack for cookies and hot chocolate!

Inside the Sugar Shack is a massive wood-burning evaporator that is used to boil the sap down to syrup.

The shed beside the Sugar Shack is filled to the top with stacks and stacks of wood.  It takes one cord of wood to make twenty gallons of syrup.

Two Maple Syrup Festivals, one at the end of the month and one in April, will be the culmination of many hours of hard work for the monks and their helpers–wood cutting and hauling, gathering supplies for tapping, checking buckets and hauling sap back to the Sugar Shack, and the evaporation process.  The real prize at the end of all that hard work will be the gallons of sweet maple syrup!

Isn’t it wonderful to have the blessing of a prayer, a song, or an eagle flying overhead as we venture out to work?  It’s important to know the history and hard work that goes into making simple, delicious food for our tables and to appreciate all the things in our lives that are provided by Nature.  May we all know the sweetness and flavor of a life well-lived!