Come walk with me in the peak Autumn beauty of the Northwoods. To say that I love this time of year is an understatement. Most everyone can appreciate the colorful falling leaves---it reveals the 'true self' of a tree when its leaves are no longer producing chlorophyll. Their true colors are revealed, and there is something simple … [Read More...]
Sap to Syrup
Early in March, I wrote about how we learned to tap maple trees at Saint John’s Arboretum. The season of sap and syrup came to an end around the second weekend in April. Two weeks prior to that, we attended an open house at Wildwood Ranch, the only commercial producer of maple syrup in our county. Wildwood Ranch is a family business that has been producing syrup since 1979. Box Elder trees were tapped near the sugar shack on the shore of the ice-covered Kraemer Lake.
But most of the trees in the sugar bush at Wildwood Ranch were tapped and connected to sap lines that criss-crossed the woods.
The sap flowed by gravity-driven vacuum lines to a pump house that moved the sap to holding tanks beside the sugar shack. Sap lines stay up all year and need to be checked in early spring for holes and damage made by nibbling squirrels and deer.
The evaporator fills the middle part of the sugar shack, shiny with its mirror-like stainless steel and hot with its wood-fired box that boils the sap down to syrup.
Sap begins its journey through warming tubes in the top and back of the unit, goes into a large back pan for evaporating water, then finally to the front pan right over the hot fire. It boils until it reaches a certain temperature or sugar level, then it is ‘drawn off’ into a kettle. The syrup is then ‘finished’ in another pan using propane heat for more control, so it doesn’t burn. A filtering process removes the ‘sugar sands,’ which are minerals that are carried into the tree with the sap.
Wildwood Ranch averages 225 gallons of syrup from 11,000 gallons of sap collected in a season from 40 acres of land. They sell their syrup at the local St. Joseph Farmers’ Market and at area businesses.
The ice was gone from the lakes two weeks later when we went to the Maple Syrup Festival at Saint John’s Arboretum. After months of white ice and snow, the lakes looked startlingly blue!
Three teams of muscular Percherons pulled wagon loads of people from the parking lot to the Sugar Shack. Activities included tapping and collection demonstrations, Native American syrup-making demonstrations, informational booths, tours of the Sugar Shack, live music, and hot maple syrup ice cream sundaes!
Sap collection at the Arboretum is an even more labor intensive endeavor.
The sap buckets on the trees were emptied into carrying buckets, then the sap was dumped into large blue barrels spaced along the dirt trails in the sugar bush.
The barrels of sap were collected and filtered with a tractor and tanker and brought to the storage tanks by the Sugar Shack. The evaporator, named ‘Big Burnie’ boiled the water off the sap, concentrating the sugar into the wonderful maple syrup. Filtering and finishing were done before bottling the amber liquid.
Saint John’s Maple Syrup is not sold to the public. The monastery uses it and gives it away as gifts to volunteers and others. Brother Walter Kieffer, OSB, who runs the maple syrup operation and has been doing the sweet work for 53 years, says, “It’s a gift to us, and it’s something we can give away.”
Hard work is intrinsic to the production of maple syrup. It is a rite of spring for the many people who have been doing it for years and decades. There’s more than one way of doing it, though the basics remain the same. And the rewards for a season of hard work are something that cannot be defined by money. There are many things in life that are like that–parenting comes immediately to mind. Think about all the gifts we are given in our lives–the gift of love, family, friends, nature, health, and time–and how we, in turn, can offer those gifts to others.
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!