Even in the city, you can tap into the maple harvest
TAKING SUGAR BUSH TOURS on festival day, or even just driving out to Elmira, you’ll see stretches of maple trees suitable for harvesting the sap that’s boiled down into syrup. But tapping into the sticky goodness is not just for rural residents thanks to the Urban Sugaring Project.
The Guelph-based cooperative allow for people with few maple trees to contribute to a greater pool of sap, and later reap the benefits with a share of the resultant maple syrup.
Organizer John Dennis spearheaded the project three years ago through Transition Guelph. After two successful seasons in that city, he expanded into Waterloo Region.
With the help of the Elmira Maple Syrup Festival’s grant disbursement program, Dennis now has around 20 taps running throughout the area. Participants fork over $10 to rent a tapping kit, and another $10 deposit and are on their way to becoming personal maple syrup producers.
Dennis explained the idea behind the project is, consistent with Transition Guelph’s mandate.
“We are about giving people skills and the tools to be able to do these projects,” he said.
People with a few mature maples on their property may think there’s oodles of maple syrup to be had, but it takes 40 litres of sap to produce just one litre of maple syrup. And that’s if the tree is one of the better varieties such as the sugar maple. A Norway maple, a popular choice for residential builders that’s common to the area, requires about 70 litres of sap to get that one litre of syrup due to its lower sugar content.
“What happens is the tapping is not that hard, simply you go to a tree and you drill a hole and you put a spigot into it and you collect the sap into a bucket. Then, you have to take it and boil it down. Now the ratios are quite high, so typically with the sugar maple we are looking at 40 to 1 so for every 40 litres of sap you’re collecting, you get one litre of syrup, so 39 litres have to be boiled off,” he said. “It’s energy intensive, it is actually a little bit of a science and a little bit of magic to get it to the right density.”
Cue the co-operative program. Dennis collects the sap from the Waterloo Region and Guelph, where he has about 120 taps running throughout the season, supplemented by ten of his own, boils it down on his personal wood-burning boilers and divvies the syrup up at the end of the season to all who contributed.
While it’s considerable work for little reward, eating syrup from one’s own backyard tree provides a similar feeling to those who grow their own vegetables – a carrot, for instance, tastes that much better when it’s the product of your own labour.
“People love the idea of having maple syrup, putting it on their pancakes or waffles and looking out and going, ‘Hey that came from my tree!’ That’s a really strong connection that people like,” he explained. “I think that’s true when people grow food in their gardens – they love the idea that they are eating a carrot from their backyard.”
Beyond the fascination though of producing something usually for rural homeowners, Dennis says it is so rewarding to make something of what would otherwise be a totally untapped resource.
“The estimate is in Guelph there 3,000-4,000 maple trees. In the greater Waterloo area there are 5,000-6,000 maple trees; the vast majority of those go untapped. So it is this great resource and it’s not being utilized,” he said. “People like maple syrup. They like the idea of especially of having their own maple syrup from their own place, so we are giving people the tools and the opportunity to tap the tree and see what that’s like.”
While the sap is still flowing, participants will happily be seeing their hard work rewarded over the next few months.