No sugar rush

Sap requires right combination of warmth and frost

There are 160 maple leafshaped depressions in an empty tray on the counter at the Mill River Sugar Shack.

Mark Arsenault, who has been running the demonstration sugar bush for the past 15 seasons, has the tray ready in case a school group calls and wants to stop in for a visit.

With a little advance notice he can have 160 pure maple sugar candies ready for sampling when the group arrives. It takes about 2.4 litres of syrup, boiled to the right temperature and duration, to fill a tray.

It’s been a slower year than normal at the sugar bush, Arsenault acknowledges. Part of that, he says, might have something to do with Mill River’s change-over from a Provincial Parks property to a private enterprise, leaving some to assume the demonstration sugar bush is no longer in operation. He gives assurances it’s business as usual.

There were numerous visitors to the sugar shack during March Break but visits have been few since then.

It’s also been slow going, so far, in collecting sap. The sugar bush needs frosty nights followed by warm days to really get the sap running, he said, confident it’s just a matter of time before the right weather conditions arrive.

“It has to have frost and then heat,” he explained.

He recently boiled down three days supply of sap, 80 litres. When the sap is running good, Arsenault said he can get about 250 litres a day from the 114 taps he has drilled into sugar maple and red maple trees. Some of the larger trees have two taps and many of the trees in the woodlot are not tapped at all.

The season is short, only lasting until the trees start to bud and, if the nighttime temperature doesn’t dip back below freezing, the yield doesn’t reach its potential.

Sap flows by gravity feed from the taps through blue tubing, which connects onto a main supply line connected to a vacuum pump in the sugar shack. Boiling the sap down to produce syrup or candy requires a careful watch of the temperature and some timely stirring.

As the sugar bush at Mill River Experience is for demonstration purposes, the syrup and the candy that it produces are not sold, but given out to people who take in the tour. Left over syrup is kept in the freezer for use at the start of the next sugar bush season.

ERIC MCCARTHY/TC MEDIA While most of the tapped trees in the Mill River sugar bush are linked by lines of tubing, Mark Arsenault still employs the old-fashioned bucket collection method, for demonstration purposes, with some of the trees.