IT''S MAPLE SYRUP TIME

This is one of my paintings when I was painting before writing.

In a recent article in my local newspaper I learned that maple syrup is a big business in Ohio. I guess I should have known that because almost every year friends and I went to Chardon, Ohio to visit various sugar camps and watch them make maple syrup as well as buy what they’d already made. There are 900 producers in Ohio.

 

It was in that article I found there were two families in my township of Southington who are making maple syrup here. Addresses weren’t given so I’m not sure where they live. I know some time ago the neighbor just to the south of me was making maple syrup by tapping his trees in his woods next to my woods.

Karl Evans, another Trumbull County maple producer, is the vice president of The Ohio Maple Producers Association. It started as a hobby thirty-four years ago and now has about 4,000 taps and produces anywhere from 900 to 1,800 gallons. Because producers rely on a cycle of freeze and thaw, cold nights followed by warmer days, they’re not so sure they’ll get much maple syrup this year because we’ve had a lot of warm days and nights for this time of year followed by a few really cold days.

The Amish use horses

This article brought back memories of my childhood when my grandfather tapped maple trees back in the woods on the west side of his property. He had an old sugar house close to the woods were he had the big metal trough high enough to have a fire underneath it to boil the sap. My father would take turns evenings with grandpa’s sons to keep the fire going all night. I also remember grandpa pulling a wagon behind his tractor onto wagon paths into the woods to pour the buckets of sap from taps on the trees into larger containers to take back to the sugar house.

Eventually, Grandpa gave up on making maple syrup and the old sugar house became a shack with broken boards and the old sugar house was torn down because the fields leading to it had been turned into corn fields.

My other memory of making maple syrup is when my oldest son John was a teenager, and he and his friend across the street started tapping trees in the woods behind the neighbor boy’s home. The first batch was made by his friend. I’m not sure how much syrup he got, but the next batch was to be John’s. So I started boiling it for John while he was in school and when it almost got down to turning into maple syrup, I had my parents and a sister over for a Sunday dinner as I did almost every other Sunday. I put to the large pot off to one side on the kitchen counter. Later I discovered that after dinner either my mom or my sister dumped it thinking it was juice I didn’t need for the pot roast dinner we’d had. So that was the end of John’s making maple syrup.

I have a lot of maple trees in my woods and some in my front yard, but I’ve never considered tapping them. I know it takes a lot of buckets like 50 gallons of sap which is 2% sugar to make one gallon of syrup. I’d rather just go north to some of the places that make and sell maple syrup than put all that work into making it myself. Also today’s producers have different machines to help them make it like a reverse osmosis system that pumps the sap at a high pressure into the filter system, forcing water out of the sap and reducing the boiling time needed. From there it goes to the evaporator to be boiled down with syrup that is 66 percent sugar.

 

I also discovered that sugar is graded along a scale from lighter to darker syrup. There is no process that makes it lighter or darker. A lot of it depends on the time of the year. Also, I knew that it can be made into maple candies, but I didn’t know they also made it into maple apple butter, or something like maple hot pepper jam and other things. I did find out where some maple sugar makers sell their products, but I’m thinking of taking my granddaughter and her little ones up to Chardon to see them making the maple sugar one of these days. That is if those businesses are still there after all these years since I’ve been there.

Have you ever watched maple syrup being made?