maple syrup at murphy's landing

We spent Saturday at Murphy's Landing for their Maple Syrup demonstrations. We loved it. We got to tromp around the woods, tap a tree and see the whole process from start to finish. Below you can see them 1. hand drilling the hole 2. pounding in the tap 3. collecting the sap 4. boiling it down in the evaporator.

Did you know it takes 40 gallons of sap from a high-producing sugar maple to make one gallon of syrup? Some trees don't have as high of a sugar content in the sap and it may take 80 gallons of sap from those trees to produce just one gallon of syrup! Suddenly the fact that pure maple syrup costs so much made a lot more sense.

They had live music and storytellers to tell of how they tapped trees in the past. They showed how they boiled the sap in large kettles over a hot fire during pioneer times. And most interesting was how Native Americans boiled their sap to make sugar. Without metal pots or pans, they hollowed out a tree into a trough...kind of like a canoe and put the sap in there, and carried hot stones from the fire and put those into the sap to evaporate the water. I was so impressed by this process to make maple sugar!

 

Ivar got to taste some maple syrup and found it very delicious.

We had this event on our calendar for months and all of the promo materials had everyone bundled in their boots and mittens, but we were in tshirts and flip flops. The early warm weather was great for us but has been terrible for maple syrup production in Wisconsin and Minnesota this year. The local news just aired this story on Friday night about the Maple farms that are calling this season a bust.