We have these awesome friends in the ward who, in turn, have an awesome friend whose family has a certified Maple tree farm which they harvest the sap & make syrup. It was neat because they all work the farm together...aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, & kids of the afore-mentioned. The season is pretty short (4-8 weeks), but very intense with long hours. They can't have schools come for field trips for liability purposes anymore so they invite as many kids/families as possible instead & we were the lucky ones this weekend! We got to go see the first half of the process (they do the actual boiling down on Sundays :( .
Our crew.
The filter
The copper basins that are the originals (like, 100 yrs-ish) that the sap is poured in to boil it down. It takes 300 gallons of sap to make 40 gallons of syrup!
All the past jars they've used to package the syrup.
The current jars with the goods.
While they were cleaning the basins, we visited the horses and sheep.
Then the boys rode on the back of the 4-wheeler while the gals rode in a little trailer behind to go check the lines...
The up-to-date technology of maple farms is gravity lines that snake through the trees downhill the sap into big blue containers.
Our job was to run our hands along the lines checking for squirrel nibbles via the sticky drips, see exhibit A: the picture below (on the black connector piece)
Then, back to the house hitch up the team to go collect from the sap buckets. Work horses are trained together their whole life & if their partner dies, they can't work with another horse...
Jaydon got to sit up front
Watch out, here we come.
A bumpy mile down the muddy road into the trees...hold on, you could fall off for reals.
The path in the trees is narrow & the branches are ruthless say my thighs & their purple bruises
The buckets hung from the spyles on the trees
The sap wagon has a big 200 gallon drum hooked on the back so we'd run to all the trees, pick the big ice chunk out (sap doesn't freeze, just the water in it so that has to be thrown out)...
...then pour the sap into our buckets
& then when they're full we take them back to the wagon so they can pour it in. Multiply that by a million and that was what we did :) It was so fun!
Some trees had a couple buckets and the amount of sap varied a ton
Jyson is pointing to a 'scar' from a drilled hole from a previous year...as long as it's not too high on the tree you can drill many many holes, but each has to be so far away from the other holes.
This is a picture of an old-time bucket, sap collector
Pretty papery leaves that decided they wanted to stay with their tree.
The forest is beautiful!
Just don't step on any of the rusty relics...we asked about the story behind this car ending up amidst the tree and awesomely...he said he couldn't remember!
Back at this house after our labors...this stained glass was done by the wife of one of the guys there, complete with the little 3D buckets on the trees. Gorgeous.
They called later in the week & said we cut their time in half we were all such great helpers & wondered if we wanted to come back! Seriously, the boys were amazing (so were the little gals), didn't complain a bit about hauling heavy sap buckets and loved every minute! Go Indiana!
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