Maple Sugar Days

Maple Sugar Days at Farbach Werner Nature Preserve on the last weekend in February is something our family looks forward to attending every year now.  It’s fun, educational, TASTY and gives us one of the first outward signs that spring is actually coming. 

Brothers and sisters enjoying being together on a family friendly Saturday.  The trees have been tapped for a couple of weeks already while it is still plenty cold outside.

Inside the education building there you can learn all kinds of things about sugaring and TASTE any kind of thing you could imagine putting maple in and even a few you probably haven’t thought of.  Everything maple; butter, candy, pancakes, granola, syrup tasting, pudding, hot dogs and I know I’m missing more.  All tastes are unbelievably good.

My children have a great daddy!

There is an outpost set up on the tour that teaches us about the early days of learning tree tapping and sugaring off.  What is Kaitlyn checking out?

An animal pelt.  It is soft.  And in front of this shelter they are boiling sap in a hallowed tree log with hot rocks just as early settlers learned to do.  Seems like a lot of time and effort went into getting a little bit of sugar.  We are told there were small wars and thefts over this sugar.  It was certainly something to guard.

As we continued on our walk we checked out the buckets.  Taps were still dripping steadily in the sunlight.

On to the goldfish pond!  No turtles, frogs or fish yet.

Reflection in pond and sisters, almost a decade apart in age.

As we each went and purchased our maple candy with our spending money if we brought any and our annual purchase of real maple syrup Rick and I purchased a spiel so that we could tap our own Maple tree.  I think we talked about doing this all year long.  While we don’t have a sugar maple it is another kind of maple that can be tapped; just not the best kind.  Fair enough.  We thought it would be fun and educational to try out the tree tapping sugaring process for ourselves.

 

Returning home our cats were getting cozy and warm for the evening.

Kaitlyn got some music practice in and Nathan spent some time doing puzzles

while pancakes sizzled and fried on the stovetop.  Served with real maple syrup the stacks of pancakes were amazing and a great way to end the day.

In our first day we got a pint of tree sap. Our tree starts its sap flow a little earlier than the sugar maple and so this was our best 24 hour period due to weather and timing. Next year we should try tapping the tree a few weeks earlier. Next year I’d also like a different container used for collection; maybe a wired canning jar. My husband is opting for a cleaned out milk jug as a popular solution after reading a library book about backyard sugaring. We’ll see.

We boiled the little bit of sap that we did get from our front tree and though we didn’t get much it was sort of exciting that it worked at all!  We each got a taste and learned a few things that will change how we tap next year so we can watch… and taste this process from beginning to end once again.