MSPAC, in partnership with the CT Park and Forest Association and the CT Department of Environmental Protection, received a grant from USDA and CT Dept. of Agriculture to assess the potential to substantially increase the production/dollar value of CT maple products with a three pronged approach. (1) Increase the maple trees tapped. Connecticut currently taps less than 1% of the maple trees in the state that are old enough to be tapped. Not only is the goal to increase trees tapped but also to promote environmentally sustainable forest management by CT land owners through increased use of the lands for maple syrup production. (2) Enhance current equipment to achieve significantly increased productivity in current operations. New environmentally friendly technologies (vs. 10 years ago) have quadrupled syrup yield per tap and output per energy unit while significantly lowering operating costs with virtually no increase in carbon emissions. (3) Develop a marketing model that includes CT maple sales in high traffic retail outlets in addition to current specialty stores, farmers’ markets and farm stands. The grant was awarded in 2010 and runs through 2013. Two pilot programs are underway. At the end of the grant results will be published. Maple syrup and maple sugar (dehydrated maple syrup) were the New World's first natural sweeteners. Long before European settlers arrived with the European honeybee to make honey, American Indians dwelling in the Northeast were setting up sugaring camps among the plentiful sugar maple trees each spring. These camps produced an indigenous nutrient-rich sweetener high in minerals.
Indian folk tales present several different versions of how it all began. One legend tells the story of an Iroquois chief who threw his tomahawk into a maple tree one early March eve. When he retrieved it the following morning to go hunting, he noticed sap oozing from the cut in the tree. He collected some in a container and his wife added some of the syrup to the meat she was cooking for dinner. As the sap boiled down, a wonderful sweet maple flavor remained. The Indian process of sugar making, crude by modern-day standards, employed hollowed out logs, heated rocks for evaporating the sap, and handmade birch bark containers for collecting the sap and storing the maple sugar. Most of the tribes boiled and crystallized the sap they collected into a granulated maple sugar—bypassing the syrup stage as syrup was harder to store—ending up with a more transportable sweetener. Oliver L. Scranton, Maple Grove Farm, North Guilford (c. 1960). New England winters can be interminable. By the time February rolls around, the skies are gray and the snow is brown. March shows signs of warmer weather as thin sheets of ice stretch across the frozen mud. I understand why some people don’t like this time of year. But growing up, the weeks between Presidents’ Day and St. Patrick’s Day were a sweet, golden amber dream known as maple syrup season. By age seven, I was an integral part of the sugaring operations at Maple Grove Farm in North Guilford, Connecticut. Maple sugaring was a family affair, and each one of us had a role to play. I was the tour guide, and I took my job very seriously. I would show visitors the sap buckets and collection tanks, let them taste the clear, sugar-water-flavored sap and explain the entire sugaring off process. Everything I knew I had learned from my grandfather, whom I adored. He taught me that it was the Native Americans who shared the secrets of maple syrup production with our ancestors, even though there were plenty of sugar maples in Europe. He taught me that the sap runs when cold nights alternate with warm days – and that the sap stops running when the leaves start developing. Finally, he taught me the show stopping statistic that was guaranteed to get a low whistle: it takes 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup. While I loved being a tour guide, the best time of day was after the visitors left. My cousins, nine and eleven, and I would go with my grandfather to collect the sap. The two boys would dump buckets of sap into the collection tank on the trailer. I sat with my grandfather, occasionally steering the big green John Deere tractor through the fields. As the sun set, we would finish collecting the sap and head back to the sugar house. Sometimes we’d have pancakes for dinner, with a little bit of hot maple syrup drawn right from the evaporator. Other times we’d have chili or stew – which meant that dessert would be a maple syrup taffy made by pouring maple syrup onto fresh snow and letting it chill enough to become a sweet, flexible treat. My grandfather died in 1984, a few months shy of my tenth birthday. As good Yankees, we didn’t talk about everything we had lost. Instead, we tapped trees, hung buckets, strung up tubing and stacked the wood that would fuel the evaporator. These simple acts gave us a sense of purpose and brought us together at a time when the strain of caring for my grandmother, who had severe Alzheimer’s, threatened to tear the family apart completely. In that small sugar house, over stacks of pancakes smothered in hot syrup, we shared our stories – breaking with one tradition while upholding another. By age seven, Erica Holthausen was the official tour guide for maple syruping operations at Maple Grove Farm in North Guilford, Connecticut. A marketing mentor and freelance writer, this article first appeared as a part of a Food Memories book published as part of A Life in Context Project.
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