SHILOH – The temperature has to be just right for sap harvest, around 50 degrees during the day and below freezing at night, making March one of the sweetest times of year.
The sugar and nutrients a maple tree makes are stored in the roots during the winter. As spring approaches and the temperature outside begins to rise, that sap is sent up to the top of the tree to make leaves. Spiles, or spouts, are drilled a few inches into the tree to redirect sap into collection buckets.
“What we’re doing is kind of like donating blood,” said seasonal naturalist Amanda Kriner. “They can survive. It’s negligible, this amount that we’re taking.”
Kriner and other employees and volunteers for the Ashland County Park District gathered at Cooke Family Wildlife Conservation Park from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday for the third maple syrup day.
In 2020, the park district started the tradition, which includes wagon rides to tapped maple trees, watching sap cook in an evaporator and free pancakes with syrup samples. The goal of maple syrup day is to encourage more of the community to explore the county’s parks, Kriner and park district director Stephanie Featheringill said.
When the 163-acre Cooke Family park was owned by the Cooke family, it had been the site of many of the same activities it remains used for today — including hunting, fishing and, of course, making maple syrup.
Sap Collection
Sap collection generally occurs between mid-February and min-March due to temperature needs for extraction.
Kriner led the hayride excursions into the park’s woods, explaining the collection process and allowing those interested to taste the raw sap.
“Do the trees ever run out of sap?” one attendee asked.
While most sap collection is insignificant, as Kriner explained, it is possible to over-tap a tree. The number of taps a tree can handle correlates to size, specifically diameter.
There are 150 taps on the Cooke Family park property, Kriner said. Most trees have one tap but others have up to three.
When a tree buds, the sap changes from the “tasty” kind used to create syrup to a cloudy, more molasses-type consistency that is no longer suitable for maple syrup, Kriner said. The sugar content in the sap drops because the tree is now sucking up nutrients from the ground and no longer using the stored sugar-rich nutrients.
The holes in the trees from tapping scar over and trees can generally be tapped again the following season, Kriner said.
Evaporation
When walking into the evaporator room, attendees were met with heat, steam and a strong whiff of burning wood.
After sap is collected from maple trees, it is stored in a holding tank and poured into an evaporator, explained Ned Lucius, one of the volunteers handling evaporation Sunday.
The evaporator boils the water out of the sap, raising the sugar content and leaving behind pure maple syrup.
Lucius’ family has a maple syrup operation in Crawford County, which has been in the family since 1994. Lucius’ father started the maple syrup operation and it is now sustained by his sons.
“We’re working on training the third generation,” Lucius said, while he and his brothers wrangled in their kids who also partook in the pancake eating that day.
As the sap boils, Lucius and his brothers use a synthetic product to break up foam as it gathers on top of the sap.
“In the olden days we used to use milk, fat, oil,” he explained. “Any kind of fat just breaks that foam up.”
Finished syrup boils at seven degrees above the boiling point of water, which is not always a consistent temperature, Lucius said.
“The wind can change our boiling point,” he explained. “If it starts raining, that can change our boiling point. If the sun moves behind the clouds, it can change our boiling point.
“It’s all based off barometric pressure.”
Lucius used a hydrometer to keep track of the sap temperature Sunday, but because he has been making syrup all his life, he can also generally tell when it is finished by checking the consistency.
Finished Product
The process of making maple syrup generally lasts three months — a month of preparation, a month of collecting and boiling sap, and a month to clean it all up, Lucius said.
Nearly 40 gallons of sap are needed to make one gallon of syrup.
While maple syrup is the well-known end result of this process, maple sugar can also be prepared from the sap of the maple tree by evaporating it further into a granulated sugar form.
Maple sugar can be used as an alternative to cane sugar in baking as well as for dry rubs. Lucius is also experimenting with making icing and cotton candy using maple sugar, but said those are works-in-progress for now.
While several activities Sunday allowed attendees an inside look at production, the day was not complete without getting to also eat the final product. Stacks of pancakes drenched in fresh maple syrup were served free for all, and jugs of the syrup and other maple products were available for purchase.
