Maple Weekend™ Kicks Off with Preview of North Country Sugarhouses

Maple Weekend Overview
In New York State, 110 maple sugar producers opened their doors to visitors for the 14th Annual Maple Weekend™ on March 28-29, but in my county four of the seven participating producers also welcomed visitors on March 21-22. I took the opportunity for a preview of three producers the first weekend and then checked out the other four on the 'official' weekend.

All of the sugarhouses were within an hour of my house, and some were under 30 minutes away, still, all told, I traveled about 300 miles over the two weekends. I visited Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County; The Orebed Sugar Shack; Thompson's Tree Farm; Hugh's Sugar Shack; Rutley's Maple Farms; Fine-n-Dandy; and Woody's Maple.

I collected so much information from these generous producers that I wrote a separate article for each one. This is the first, relating my experience at Cornell Cooperative Extension in Canton, the inaugural stop on my self-directed sugarhouse tour.

I had some romantic notions about maple sugaring before I visited Cornell Cooperative. I envisioned a quaint wooden sugarhouse in the forest, surrounded by trees with tin buckets attached to catch dripping sap. Inside the sugarhouse I pictured a big tub of sap boiling over a blazing wood fire and perhaps a family and community of maple merry-makers enjoying this spring tradition.

That type of maple sugaring still exists as 'backyard sugaring', but in commercial production, producers use an amazing array of sophisticated equipment and techniques, including Reverse Osmosis, room-sized evaporators, and miles of plastic tubing attached to a vacuum system for collection. Yet for the most part, maple sugaring is still a family tradition - in some cases several generations on the same farm!

The window for making maple syrup is very small because sap only flows in the spring when the nights are freezing and the days are above zero (usually from mid-March to mid-April), so speed is of the essence in collecting sap and boiling it into syrup.

Compounding the limited timeframe is the quantity of sap that needs to be collected - it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup! And, depending on method, it can take 16 hours from sap to syrup.

So, to be financially lucrative, the producer needs to figure out how to tap as many trees as possible before the sap starts flowing; how to get tremendous quantities of sap from the trees to the sugarhouse; and then how to speed up the boiling process to make as much syrup as possible as quickly as possible.

Each of the sugarhouses I visited used slightly different angles and environs to accomplish those tasks. Since this was my first visit to the world of maple sugar producing, I was astounded by the engineering, mechanics, and chemistry required!

All of the sugarhouses involved driving through pleasant farm country, so come along on my first of seven stops for Maple Weekend. If you're an old-time producer, you'll see what fascinates a newcomer, and if this is your first encounter, the next time you pour syrup on your pancakes, you'll know how it was made!

Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County
My first-ever visit to a sugarhouse was on Saturday, March 21, when I drove to the Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County in Canton, New York.

I was taken aback by my first sighting of one of the primary pieces of modern syrup-making equipment - the evaporator, a huge contraption of metal pipes and pans. This one is actually only 4' by 12', but when you're expecting a pot and a fire, it looked monstrous!

I saw six more versions of evaporators on my tour and every one of them was different - some bigger, some smaller, some new and some old. This one is on the older side.

The people inside the sugarhouse were wearing St. Lawrence County Maple Producers Association caps and were eager to answer questions and share their expertise. One kind lady in particular took me under her wing and gave me a brief history, tour, and some interesting facts.

I learned that this was formerly the site of the State University of New York (SUNY) Canton College Farm before the Cooperative located here. The 'sugar bush' (the woods where maple sap is collected) is a very old one and had sustained considerable damage during the 1998 Ice Storm and had not been tapped for many years.

Then three years ago, the St. Lawrence County Maple Producers Association got involved in helping the CoOp to restore the maple sugaring operation. Each year, local high school students, 4-H Club, and Future Farmers of America members all participate in the maple sugar operation to learn about it and possibly carry on the tradition.

To give me an idea of what's involved, my guide told me a couple of statistics that I was to hear over and over again during Maple Weekend: it takes 40 gallons of sap and three gallons of fuel oil to boil out all the water and produce one gallon of maple syrup! That's a lot of sap!

At the Cornell Cooperative, they have installed about 650 plastic taps in the trees to collect sap. The taps are connected to plastic tubing, which empties into collecting tanks in the sugar bush.

Workers use trailers to haul larger tanks into the sugar bush to collect the sap out of the smaller tanks. They have seven of these larger tanks which each hold between 100 to 300 gallons. They usually collect sap between 5 PM and 6 PM, but sometimes the sap runs so strongly that they collect it twice a day, gathering the overnight flow in the morning.

The farm still uses some of the old buckets and taps for trees that are not connected to the plastic tubes.

Once the sap is trailered to the sugarhouse, the water is evaporated out of it using a Reverse Osmosis (RO) machine, which takes out most of the water before the sap goes to the evaporator.

I discovered later that all of the commercial producers use RO and that it is just as essential as the evaporator.

After evaporation, the syrup is filtered. I was shown one of the white 'felt sock' filters, which was brown after use. I learned later from other producers about the pressure filters.

Much more on RO and filtering is included in my upcoming visits to the other sugarhouses.

True to its roots in education, this CoOp used its huge barn across from the sugarhouse to house displays from the various associations including 4-H Club, Future Farmers of America, and St. Lawrence County Maple Producers Association. They had tables full of take-away materials about trees, forestry, and maple sugaring, including great four-color brochures from the New York State Maple Producers Association, Inc. I now have their Consumers Guide listing all the contact information for producers throughout the state.

Maple products were available for sale, including syrup, cream, and cotton candy. The generous lady selling the cotton candy let me sample it - a first for me. It's not the pink confection you see at fairs, but rather a very light beige color with a cottony texture that melts in your mouth and has a creamy maple taste! Wonderful stuff!

Visitors to the Cornell Cooperative Extension were given tickets to the food vendor on-site where we were handed cups of vanilla ice cream and a plastic squeeze bottle of very dark maple syrup to drizzle over it. It was delicious!