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Making a sweet treat in the regional parks

Families help bring in the springtime harvest of maple sap

One child refuses to taste anything that comes out of a tree. Another cautiously dips a finger in the bucket of sap, brings it to her lips and wrinkles her nose.

A third is racing from bucket to bucket, trying to find the tree with the sweetest sap.

Welcome to the “sugar bush” in springtime.

“Sugar bush” is the name for a stand of maple trees that are tapped for their sap to make maple syrup. Not the big brand names you find on the shelves in a typical supermarket, which is not maple syrup at all. No, this is the real stuff: maple sap boiled down to a fraction – 1/40th – of its original volume.

Making maple syrup is an art that European settlers learned from indigenous people in the northern hardwood forests. Today, several parks in the metropolitan regional park system have programs for people to learn and experience how it’s done.

Needed: A good freeze-thaw cycle

This spring’s weather has been perfect for a plentiful sap harvest. What’s required are days with above-freezing temperatures and nights below freezing, explained Lenny Schmitz, Parks Coordinator for Carver County Parks. The daytime warmth brings the sap from the roots up into the tree, and the nighttime freeze sends it back down into the roots. The flow allows people to tap into the trees and capture the sap.

On a sunny day in mid-March, Schmitz tromped into the woods through the melting snow at Baylor Regional Park in southwestern Carver County with a group of young students from Zion Lutheran School in Cologne. He showed them how to drill at the correct angle and depth into the trunk, and then plug the hole with a tube connected to a bucket below. The buckets are sealed to keep out deer, raccoons and other creatures that like to drink the sweet sap.

“Does it hurt the tree?” a child asked.

No, Schmitz explained, the trees are resilient and the sap that comes out of the hole is only a fraction of what the tree produces. The holes heal over during the summer and fall, and next season, tappers pick a different spot on the trunk to drill again.

Boiling down the sap

During a good run, the five-gallon buckets at Baylor are emptied once or twice each day into a larger container, which is carried by tractor back to the “syrup shack” where, in a two-stage process, the sap is boiled down in special vats to make syrup. Schmitz demonstrated how he uses a hydrometer to detect the sugar content of the syrup batch to make sure it’s right for bottling.

“On the days we’re boiling the sap the whole area around the shack smells really good,” Schmitz said.

Reward: Pancakes and syrup

At Eastman Nature Center in Elm Creek Regional Park Reserve, in Dayton, parents and their young children first gather indoors to learn about the natural cycle that helps trees produce sap. A slide show illustrates the Ojibway tradition of making syrup and maple sugar, and helps children learn to identify maple trees.

Before they go outdoors, everyone gets to do a “taste test” to see if they can tell which of two syrups is real and which is a typical supermarket brand. Before they are told the answer, the consensus is that the real stuff tastes better.

Then it’s out to the sugar bush, just a few yards behind the nature center. Children taste the sap dripping from metal spigots. Parents help their children empty the metal buckets hanging on the trees into larger buckets, and then haul the larger buckets to the outdoor fire where the sap is boiled down in a huge kettle.

Their reward? A lunch of sausage and pancakes, topped with the homemade syrup and welcomed with smiles all around.  

More photos of syrup-making in regional parks.