Skip to main content

Maple Fest 2016

Maple Fest 2016


Our county parks department puts on a Maple Fest in the even numbered years. And so, out we went. This is a modern tapping system - plastic spilees, plastic tubes, and a plastic collection bag.


Not a typical collection bucket, but it let us see the sap dripping out of the tree. Sap can run for as little as 6 days or as much as 6 weeks. It all depends on the temperatures.


Trees are typically tapped in late winter or early spring, but it isn't the date they go by, but the temperatures. To make the sap run, temps must be below freezing at night and above freezing during the day.


Maple trees (ash, dogwood and one other) grow branches directly opposite each other. That plus the 5-pronged leaf make them easy to identify.


Native americans were the first to collect maple sap and cook it down to sugar which was easily stored. They heated the sap by heating rocks by the fire and setting the hot rocks into a container (hollowed log, tightly woven basket, or pottery dish) containing the sap.


The fire, rocks, and sap had to be tended by the women and children all day long. Ash was strained out using a woven grass straining tool.


Maple sugar - the preferred method of keeping maple sweetening around for use and trade.


Pioneers came along with their cast iron cooking pots and refined the process a bit. Starting with the raw sap in the largest pot and cooking it down, pouring it into smaller and smaller pots ...


until they also ended up with a firm lump of maple sugar. It's the cone-shaped thing in the middle of the photo.


It' takes 40 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup. And you wondered why real maple syrup cost so much more than the fake stuff. Now you know.


Evolution of the spile, used to tap the trees and drain the sap.


Our group. That's my husband in the black vest and daughter in the pink hat.


Yellow-bellied sapsuckers are a breed of woodpecker bird known for their own maple tree sap collection methods.


One bird will tap a row of holes all the way around a tree, leave for a couple hours, and come back to a lovely meal of maple sap. An added bonus is if the ants have arrived before their return.


And the modern method of cooking down the sap - a 4-bin wood-burning cooker. Maple sap is 97.5% water and just 2.5% sugar.


Early in the season syrup is light-colored (golden) and with a lighter flavor. Dark syrup is from later sap. Ohio ranks 4th or 5th most years in maple syrup production. Vermont is 1st of the states. Canada is 1st in the world. That said, maple syrup is a Canada and eastern, north of Kentucky US thing.


A warm pancake with a bit of real maple syrup. Yum!

 

And of course, when we got home we cooked up some pancakes and sausages to have with real maple syrup.

Cheers - Ann







Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Homeschooling and Field Trips

After reading Homeschool Adventures: Learning through Field Trips by Melissa Calaap, I knew field trips were going to be a regular part of our homeschool journey. Hands-on learning, experiences, talking with people on site.. that is where deep learning happens. And honestly, field trips were the best days of my own public school experience. Hello Ft Wayne Children's Zoo, Amish Acres, and Cotton Bowl Parade. My local homeschool community regularly organized park days, the occasional trip to the museum, IMAX movie, and other one-off meet-ups, but there wasn't a regular set pattern of field trips on the caliber of what I was looking for. So I had a decision to make. Did I sit and wait for others to create the opportunities I was looking for or did I do it myself? Now, coming from the public school background I came from, my first inclination was to wait for others to come up with the idea and organize it. I mean that's how it worked at the schools, right? In fact, the school a

So Much Stuff

We live in a world of SO MUCH stuff. It's overwhelming just how much stuff there is in our world, at least in the US part of the world. Yesterday, I had a couple of hours to kill, and because my husband and I have decided we would prefer to furnish our home with antiques, I decided to take a walk through the local antiques mall. The antiques mall is in an old building downtown that used to be a JCPenney, so if you're familiar with the JCPenney stores of the 1970s and before, you'll know what I mean when I say it's big, really big, as in 3 floors of stalls of antiques. And the antiques range as far as they can from crochet-edged hankies to pyrex bowls to cast iron hand pumps to hoosier cupboards. Truly, if you're looking for a specific item, and you're willing to spend the time, you'll find it in this store. So much stuff.  Most of it just sits there, collecting dust. Like wall-hanging thread holder which I first spotted the first time I w

Learning about Home Education and Homeschooling

What is home ed? How does homeschooling work? Will my kids be behind? How do I choose a curriculum? Will my kids have friends? and more are all questions that get asked when parents start looking into home education for their children. So where is the place to go to get all this information? Where is the best place to learn about the topic of homeschool? My friend, there is not one place to go. There just isn't because home ed is as varied and individualized as the families that choose it. And even within families with multiple children, it varies. And that is one of the many, many benefits of home ed. So where to start?  And that, I can help you with. There are many, many resources for learning about home ed and they come in different media, so go with works for you, for where you are right now. And later, once you know a bit, then push yourself into something less comfortable. FILMS Class Dismissed -  http://classdismissedmovie.com/ Self Taught -  https://www.selftaughtmovie.com