Maple Sugar

 
If you’ve ever read Little House in the Big Woods, there are a couple of things that have probably stayed with you:

1.     How adorable it is to read about little children playing with lead bullets and then sticking their fingers in their mouths

2.     How much fun maple sugaring is

Needless to say, when Lesley and I discovered that they make maple sugar at the farm, we were pretty excited. We were only a little nervous when people expressed doubt about this year’s maple sugar harvest because of the mild winter. We knew the ghost of Laura Ingalls Wilder wouldn’t let us down.

Just about every morning when we get done feeding the animals, we make our way around the farm collecting the sap from all of the buckets. Before we came here, we knew that you have to boil the sap and evaporate a lot of water to make maple syrup, but we were still a little startled to learn that it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple sugar. If it took 100 gallons of sap to make a gallon, it would still be worth the effort because maple syrup is amazingly delicious and farms can also make around $100 per gallon. So if a farmer is lucky enough to have maple trees, it can be a nice source of income during the winter months when there isn’t a whole lot else to sell.

All of the sap we collect gets taken to another local farm that has an evaporator. Yesterday, we dropped off around 200 gallons of sap along with bottles to be filled with maple syrup. We got to spend some time in the sugar shack learning more about the whole process. 

With all of the maple syrup that we’ll be surrounded by for the next five weeks or so, it is hard not to find excuses to put it on everything.