A SWEET SEASON
Maple syrup producers begin tapping trees for this spring’s harvest,
Maple-syrup producers both large and small hoping 2018 will be a sweet year
Eric Girard slowly circles a maple tree in his side yard, spotting the holes that have held sap spigots in past years on a massive tree that’s decades-old.
You shouldn’t place a new spigot within 15 centimetres of an old hole, he tells a couple of observers, a sap bucket in one hand and a specially-equipped drill in the other. Nor should the holes be too high, too low or all in one line, he recommends, before squatting down to take a closer look at the bark on the aging tree.
Satisfied with a spot on a maple tree that winds high up into the sky, Girard drills a small hole into the tree, taps in a spigot with a hammer and hangs a bucket — one of two sap catchers that wait to catch the sweet water that flows from the tree synonymous with Canada.
“You need to know what you’re doing so you don’t harm the trees,” Girard says. “You’ve got to be smart and intelligent and know what you’re doing.”
It’s pretty safe to say Girard knows what he’s doing. Maple syrup, it might seem, could be flowing through his veins given the passion and knowledge he showcases while giving visitors a tour of his sugar shack setup. Raised in Victoriaville, Que. — the province that produces the bulk of Canada’s maple syrup — Girard comes from a family of proud maple-syrup makers that has a long history of tapping trees.
“It brings families together,” Girard says of the culture of maple syrup, reminiscing of times when bonfires burned outside of sugar shacks and meals were enjoyed inside. “It’s something like farming: You don’t do it to make a big pile of money, you do it because you love doing it. It really brings people together.”
A banker by trade, Girard is somewhat of a maple-syrup aficionado in his spare time. Shortly after moving into his north Oshawa home, near the Whitby border, Girard continued his lifelong dabbling in the maple-syrup business with his new neighbour, Randy Kalebaba. The two began by tapping a few trees and then boiling the sap, transforming it into sweet syrup, outside underneath a gazebo.
Discussions followed, ideas were hatched and soon, with the help of Kalebaba, Girard turned his pool shed into a scaled-down version of a modern sugar shack. A gleaming evaporator is the centrepiece, complete with digital instruments and alarms. A reverse osmosis system sits behind the evaporator, which reduces the water content in the sap and, as a result, dramatically cuts the boiling time.
A canning machine, done by hand, sits nearby on a counter, ready to seal the product prior to distributing.
Hanging on the walls are a television and dart board — it helps kill the time while the sap boils — along with recipes, maple-syrup facts and photos of a young Girard, now 44, his identical twin brother and other family.
“I’m a little bit serious, but it’s still a hobby for me,” he says of his investment into maple syrup.
Along with the quartet of trees he taps in his own yard, Girard rents a five-acre plot of land on Hwy. 47, between Uxbridge and Greenbank, where last year he placed 600 buckets on hundreds of trees. This year, in an effort to become more efficient, he has replaced his buckets with the more modern tube process that sees sap flow directly from trees to tanks — thanks to gravity.
“It’s much easier on my back,” Girard says.
That sap is then loaded into a 425- gallon plastic tank that slides in and out of his pickup truck, delivering the sweet tree water back to north Oshawa. From there, it’s pumped directly into a holding tank on the outside of Girard’s homemade sugar shack where it waits to be boiled down into maple syrup.
During the maple-syrup season, Girard acknowledges, it’s rare to find him not checking the weather on his phone as sap is famously finicky — cold nights and warm days are a necessity to get the sap flowing. “It’s been so-so this year,” Girard says of the 2018 season.
Almost three weeks into the 2018 season, Girard has boiled sap twice, creating about eight gallons of syrup. Last year — “It was average, not the best, not the worst,” he says — five boils resulted in 55 gallons over a month’s worth of work. On average, it takes about 40 gallons of sap to create one gallon of maple syrup.
“I’m not concerned yet,” Girard says of this season, pointing to this weekend’s forecast that could yield him as much as 25 gallons of syrup if conditions hold up.
A long stone’s throw from Girard’s place, on Scugog Island just east of Port Perry, Ont., Jason Traviss is all smiles when asked how his syrup season is going.
Always helping out friends’ families with their maple syrup seasons when he was younger, Traviss branched out on his own four years ago and now operates Stones Throw Farm on Demara Rd. as a hobby business.
Last year, he had 100 taps on his 50acres of land, but this year has scaled back to about a dozen or so due to family issues.
After the sap is transformed into syrup, Traviss gives it away to family and friends and also sells it alongside the eggs and honey that comes from his property. The family is also dabbling in lavender and later hopes to offer unique experiences for visitors that include pumpkins, strolls through woodland trails and bonfires.
“Family experiences,” Traviss says. “That’s what people are looking for, that’s what brings people out and that’s what we want to provide for them.”