March 17, 2013

• Our Adventures:  It’s Sugarbush Time!
  

  This weekend, we went to Sugarbush at Blandford Nature Center.  It’s actually our second time going… I think Lydia was four or five last time, and I had Isaac in a sling and wore him thru the tour, that’s how long ago it was.  And we’d gone with a HUGE homeschooling group, so I didn’t hear half of it, and… well, I was excited to go back – this time with kids that were older and with Brian along, too!

  May 9th was actually the Sugarbush festival, with tours all day, a pancake breakfast, and all sorts of activities.  But you know me – I don’t like people.  The festival promised to be packed (because everything around here, is), BUT…!  I went to the website and checked their calendar, and they were having a smaller tour the next weekend, open to limited participation.  So THAT sounded more our speed, and we signed up!

    I learned a LOT this time around.  Way more than last time, for sure.  First, did you know that sugar maples are not found throughout the US?  No… here’s a map of the only area in the world that has sugar maples… and of that, the green areas are the ONLY areas that have the proper temperatures for getting maple sugar.  The yellow areas have sugar maples, but do not have the correct temperature for the trees to be tapped.  And the blue area above is an area that has them, but is too cold.  It’s what they predict will be able to sugarbush, if temperatures keep increasing.  But right now, the green areas are where 99.9% of the maple syrup in the world is from.  I hadn’t realized that most people CANNOT go to a sugarbush!  I mean, this time of year, we drive around out by where we live, and it’s common to see trees with blue sacks or hoses tapped into them.  It’s kind of a thing… a lot of people do it.  I always wanted to, but… it wasn’t until Sugarbush yesterday that it even became a possibility.

  Last time, they told us to identify a sugar maple by its bark… which, depending on its age could be smooth or rough or even rougher… and I was completely baffled and unable to identify jack squat.  THIS time, though, the lady explained to us that the better way to identify the sugar maple was by it’s buds and branches.   A sugar maple has syrup colored (darker brown) buds, while other maples have red or branch-colored buds.  Also, a sugar maple has OPPOSING branches (like two arms off a body – opposite of each other), while other maples have ALTERNATING branches.  Now that I can work with!  We’ve been identifying them, ever since.

    Trees get tapped two to three feet from the ground, because the sap runs downward, so to collect it, you drill a hole about 2″ into the sapwood.  Here they let the kids try it with a hand drill… even Baby Owen!  Then they got to tap the spile into their hole, just like the real thing.  Of course a bucket or sack (or hose) gets hooked up to that, and a lid put on the bucket to protect the sap from debris.

  We got our own tour guide – apparently our family of seven is a whole group on its own!  It was kind of nice, not having strangers with us, this time around.  I don’t think it was supposed to have worked that way, but when it was time to go, Denise was like “Okay, first group, come with me, let’s go!” and everyone else was like, “Um… is it time, are we ready? Where’s your hat, let me get my stuff…” (typical society), while I was like, “See that lady?  We’re with her, let’s move!” and we were out the door – the biggest family, ready first.  So that’s kind of how it happened.  Which… just more of what I’m saying about people in general.

  They took us back in time, to the Native Americans.  Legend has it that an Indian male was chopping wood for his family, and stabbed his axe into a sugar maple, and the liquid came out and ran down the handle.  He collected it to drink, and found it had a slight flavor… so he took it home to his squaw, who used it in cooking the evening meal.  It boiled down and gave the food a sweet, delicious flavor, and so they took to collecting it… and the rest is history!  Here we are, in a wigwam, learning about how the Indians collected it, boiled it down, molded it into cakes or ate it as sugar.

    Then the Indians taught the settlers how to collect the sap, and they whittled the first spiles out of sumac trees, and used large kettles to boil down the liquid to syrup.  The kids got to try wearing a yoke, just like the pioneer children who would go thru the woods and spend the early spring days emptying the buckets and bringing them back to their mother to make into candies, sugars, and syrups.  It was NICE by that fire – it was only about 30 degrees, yesterday (but one tree was running, so we got to taste sap right out of the tree.).  Oh, and inside the wigwam, it was pretty nice, too, I must add… even though the fire was out by the time we got there.  The smoldering coals still kept it pretty nice, inside.  And of course I had kids in their snowsuits, so they were warm.

  Then we got to watch the young guys drain a load out of the ‘sap-sucker’ into the tanks at the Sugar House (see above), and we went inside the sugar house to see what happens, there.  It’s just a wooden mini-lodge, with just enough room around the stove/boiler pan for a group to fit in and watch.  The sap is run into the boiler pan and heated with the wood stove under it.  They boil it about six hours, and forty gallons of sap makes 1 gallon of syrup.  It seems like a lot of work for little yield, but it’s fun, and educational, and tastes really good by the time you’re done.  Brian had a lot of questions for the man running it… but if/when we do it at home, it’ll be on the stovetop in a kettle.

  
  We had a good time at the Sugarbush presentation.  ((grins))

  Brian, to my surprise, really was intrigued by the whole thing, and wanted to try it.  I mean, I had wanted to try it when we went years ago, but when it’s just me, and I don’t know much… but he REALLY wanted to try this, so I got a free brochure from their information center on Sugarbushing at home, and we drove ALL the way out to Hudsonville to Gemmons’ Hardware.  ((Gemmons is a special place – it has all old-fashioned toys, and things most normal stores don’t carry… and they had spiles.  A lot of them!  Plastic ones that didn’t look like they’d hold up, metal slugs that you could drill your own spiles out of, and packs of stainless steel ones… but only two packages left.  I bought both of them.  Hey, the plastic cheapy ones were $3.25 each, so $18 for four stainless ones seemed like a good deal (and otherwise, I’d have to order on-line and pay shipping, anyhow).  Silly manufacturer… they have pictures of alternating branches on the package!!

  

  At Blandford, they had little maple candies for $1 each, but that seemed pretty pricey… but at Gemmons they had homemade caramel sticks that were 5/$1, so we did those, instead.  They weren’t maple, but had maple flavoring, and that worked perfect for me!

  So this morning, we got up and (okay, I re-potted my banana trees and served green milk and mint oreos and Little Debbie Shamrock cookies for breakfast… hey, it’s Patty’s Day, after all!)… then the kids got eight emptied and washed out apple juice jugs while Brian got his hole saw blade and drill from the barn.  We drilled a hole in each bottle, and rinsed out the bottles (from plastic debris) and got everyone dressed up and went out to tap some trees on our property!  It was nippy – only 26 degrees out, so the sap wasn’t running yet, but everyone was excited.

  The problem is that you can’t tap a tree smaller than 10″ in diameter, and the ones that are ten inches or more?  The branches are WAY up there!  But we found eight of them, and each kid was in charge of two bottles.  Daddy drilled into the trees and used a mallet to set the spiles… and we hung our bottles right on the trees.

  So as of today, we’ve tapped a few trees around the play yard at home.  We actually have over an acre of virgin hardwood forest on our property in the back, so there is a CRAPload of trees we could tap, but we’re just giving it a try up where we can get to them easily, at this point.  It’s fun to try new things, and… well, the kids are pretty giddy about the whole thing.  They’ve been watching the temperature all morning, hoping for it to get over 32 degrees, today.

  So there’s our weekend adventure…
                      and we’re trying something new on the homestead!

  • 11:58 am
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