Making maple syrup elementary
CONNOQUENESSING TWP — Lutherlyn becomes sap central in February and March, when the maple trees in the 660-acre camp are flowing with sugary sap, making late winter months at the camp an ideal time and place for harvesting.
The campground hosted fifth grade students from Butler Catholic School on Tuesday, Feb. 11, where students learned all there is to know about collecting sap and turning it into maple syrup.
Todd Garcia-Bish, director of environmental education at Lutherlyn, told the two-dozen fifth-graders in attendance that creating their own maple syrup could be possible in their own backyards. He taught them not only the process maple syrup goes through, but also the science behind sap and tree biology.
“Maple sugaring, you can only do at the end of the winter; that’s when the sugar is in the sap and being sent up the tree,” Garcia-Bish said. “We need temperatures that are above freezing during the day and below freezing at night, that’s what makes the sap move in the tree.”
Rae Harrison, director of environmental programming at Butler Catholic School, said her students are always interested in getting outside, especially in her class, where she teaches them how to grow plants and tend gardens. Harrison said teaching children that sap from everyday trees can become syrup could further ignite their love for plants and the outdoors.
“Maple sugaring, this is a light switch,” Harrison said. “Maple sap starts growing, we’ll be planting seeds. This is the beginning, now they know.”
Students started the day at Lutherlyn in the woods, where they took buckets to spiles placed in trees to collect sap from maple trees. Matthew Dudley, one of the Butler Catholic fifth-graders, said he was familiar with the process, having collected sap from trees at his home for years.
Matthew knew that the best way to harvest sap was to angle them downward, so gravity would help the liquid sap drip right into the buckets underneath. He also knew a thing or two about how to identify maple trees, particularly red maples, which have a certain way of growing from the ground.
“I've lived around red maples for a while, so I know how they grow. They grow in a cone shape,” Matthew said. “Silver (maples) have more peeled bark. Red maples have little diamonds on the bark — they are just all over the place.”
The students’ sap harvest wasn’t extravagant Tuesday — the day’s temperature wasn’t ideal for the trees’ sap flow. According to Garcia-Bish, sap and sugar combine in a tree when it’s cold, and then the sap begins flowing inside the tree when it warms up outside.
Conditions need to be pretty exact for a good sap yield, he said.
“If it stays warm for too long then it stops. And if it stays cold it doesn't start,” Garcia-Bish said of the sap inside maple trees.
Garcia-Bish said May is an important month in determining the coming winter’s yield of tree sap in an area.
“If we have a rainy May — it’s cloudy — so the leaves don't make as much sugar in May, and that kind of slows them down the rest of the year so they don’t store as much in the fall,” Garcia-Bish said. “If we have a nice sunny May, that’s more sugar the next year.”
Despite less than ideal conditions, students took their available sap to the camp’s Maple Sap Shack, where its evaporator is stored, to learn about the next step of the maple syrup-making process.
Inside the Maple Sap Shack, Joe Grippo, Lutherlyn’s evaporator operator, was boiling water filled with sap samples, to get the concentrate needed to make certified maple syrup. The evaporator in the shack was a metal tank, which could be fed sap through a tube on the outside of the wooden structure.
Grippo explained that as water evaporates when boiled, it condenses the sap into a higher sugar content, which is why sap is so sticky with low viscosity, and why it is so sweet.
“What we’re trying to do is boil the water away at 212 degrees, but to get that big change in the maple syrup to become syrup and lose the evaporation, you need a minimum of 219 degrees,” Grippo said. “And then you continue to boil it until that concentration of the sugar.”
The evaporation process needs a little precision, Grippo said, because if the sap loses too much moisture, it can become too solid.
“We’re going to keep boiling the water out until we get to 67.9% sugar content, which then becomes officially maple syrup,” Grippo said. “If I’m not paying attention and get too high a temperature, then we start getting into making maple sugar. What will happen, is it crystallizes.”
Erica Miller, assistant director of environmental education at Lutherlyn, said it can take up to 60 gallons of sap to make a gallon of maple syrup.
With February and March being Lutherlyn’s busy sap season, Grippo said he will often spend hours in the shack, tending to the evaporator so he can turn the sap into syrup in good time.
“I can do 10 gallons to 12 gallons of sap in an hour,” Grippo said. “I could probably turn out a gallon, two gallons (of syrup) a day.”
After their visit to the Maple Sap Shack, and getting a hands-on lesson on identifying trees by their branches and bark, the Butler Catholic fifth-graders got to eat the fruits of past classes’ labor, with a pancake lunch featuring Lutherlyn maple syrup.
Brody Monaco, a fifth grade student at Butler Catholic, said he also is no stranger to the syrup-making process, because he has been to Matthew’s house before, where he has tapped trees. The prior experience also prepared him for the 20-degree temperatures that lingered in the camp Tuesday.
“I’m at Matthew’s house like two times a week,” Brody said. “We don’t mind the cold at all.”
Garcia-Bish said the camp probably will have no trouble keeping up with the maple trees’ sap production, because of the number of classes coming to Lutherlyn to learn about that exact process over the coming weeks.
“This is what we do in February and early March, just teach about maple sugaring,” Garcia-Bish said. “We've got another school coming tomorrow doing the same thing, and another the next day and another Friday — throughout the next four weeks, we’ll have schools almost every day.”
Garcia-Bish said that teaching children about where maple syrup comes from also teaches them about history, agriculture and environmental awareness.
“We use maple sugaring as a way of teaching about plants and photosynthesis, and also teaching about Native American and early American history,” Garcia-Bish said. “It also makes a good way of learning about caring for the environment, and climate change and how it affects maple trees.”
