How To Make Maple Syrup

Today we drove an hour out of town to go maple sugaring. This isn’t actually a picture of the sugar shack, it’s just a lovely building on the property that kind of made me wish I lived there, and owned horses, and had a dog that could roam free, but only if someone else did all of the work.

Here we are inside the sugar shack, getting a look at the sap being boiled and boiled and boiled. Out east, they get one volume of syrup from 15 volumes of sap, but here in the more northerly, westerly climes, the scrawnier maple trees that are indigenous to the area only give one volume to 40 volumes, so that’s a lotta buckets of sap for one little jar of syrup.

Once it’s all boiled down, it can be used as syrup, or boiled a little more, and made into maple “butter” which is lovely spread on toast, or boiled still more and made into maple sugar.

The best part of the trip was eating maple taffy, a la Little House in the Big Woods.

Here’s T taking a look at a sap collecting pail.

Here he is taking an even closer look.

That’s L’s finger, waiting patiently for a drop of sap to fall on it.

That’s maple sugar taffy compared to the sap, which is a clear, tasteless liquid sitting in the bottom of the pail. I know it’s tasteless, because when no one was looking, I tasted it.

We also got to pet some Belgian horses, go on a wagon ride, sit in an old-style one room school house, listen to some fiddle music, and tour a convent museum. (The nun dolls in the glass case were very spooky.) All this, and we got home by one o’clock. We’re nothing if not efficient homeschool field trip takers.