Jennings takes visitors on ‘sweet’ stroll through syrup-making process
When is maple syrup not actually maple syrup?
Dozens of nature enthusiasts found the answer at Jennings Environmental Education Center on Sunday, March 2, in a program entitled “A Sweet Stroll Through Maple History.”
According to environmental education specialist Kati Edmiston, this is an annual program that coincides with the start of maple sugaring season, which typically takes place between late winter and early spring.
The program consisted of a lecture in which visitors — many of whom were curious children — received a refresher on the basics of how trees work, including some facts on the largest and heaviest trees on earth. The climax was a lesson on how sap is extracted from trees and subsequently turned into all-natural maple syrup.
This is in contrast to the kind of syrup commonly found at the grocery store, which mostly consists of high fructose corn syrup.
“What you buy in the store is artificial, and there's no real maple syrup in that,” Edmiston said.
After the lecture, visitors were led on a guided tour of the park, where DCNR park ranger Casey Layman explored the history of maple sugaring and identified the various types of trees used for extraction.
While there are 93 species of tree that grow at Jennings, most of them do not produce the ideal or enough sap for syrup. Maple trees, however, do, and at Jennings, the best trees for making syrup are red maple trees.
“If you were to accidentally tap a black cherry tree, it has cyanic acid in it,” Edmiston said. “It could give you a bellyache.”
According to Edmiston, it takes an awful lot of tree sap just to get a little bit of syrup.
“It actually takes 50 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup,” Edmiston said. “It takes a lot of time to boil that down, and because of all that labor-intensiveness, a gallon of syrup in today's market is about $44. It’s actually gone down.”
Edmiston said the process of drilling for syrup used to take place later in the year, but due to climate change, it has been pushed earlier — despite the below-freezing temperatures in Slippery Rock on Sunday.
“In years past, tapping occurred (later) in March,” Edmiston said. “But the sap is starting to run earlier.”
Although Jennings does sell some naturally made maple syrup at its gift shop, it is not made at the park, but by Old State Farm in Emlenton.
“We don't make enough that we can sell it, but we make enough that it supports our educational programming,” Edmiston said. “There are free samples that we give out and we take to schools. We do make our own syrup here at Jennings, but we don't sell it.”
