Maple Syrup

On Saturday we took a trip to an area park to learn how to make maple syrup. They do "tours" on the weekends for the last two weekends in February and the first two weekends in March. It was really interesting and informative.

Some of the fun maple syrup facts we learned:

1) Maple syrup is only harvested in a limited area of the the north eastern United States and south eastern part of Canada. That's it...for the world. This is because you need a certain type of weather, specifically cold nights (below freezing) and warm days (40 or above) in order to get the sap flowing.

2) Sugar Maple trees make the best syrup and have the highest concentration of sugar in the sap - a whopping 3%. But syrup could successfully be made from the sap of other trees but the quality is lesser and the quantity of sap needed is greatly increased.

3) It takes 40 gallons of sugar maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. In the right weather conditions a tree could produce a gallon to a gallon and a half of sap a day.

4) It can take at least six hours to cook 40 gallons of sap down to the one gallon of maple syrup.

5) The park where we went produces 16 gallons of syrup each year, which they use at their annual pancake fundraiser.

6) We can't tap the sugar maple tree in our yard until it reaches 10 inches in diameter - a forty year old tree. Ours isn't even close.

We got to taste the sap - it tastes like very slightly sweet water - and we got to taste the finished product delicious. Unfortunately the sap wasn't flowing on Saturday, it was too cold, but it was a really cool experience.