In early March, the nights are cold and the days are warmer and sunny. These are the ideal conditions for tapping sugar maple trees. In North America, sugar maples are tapped as far southwest as the State of Missouri, and as far northeast as Nova Scotia.
While larger maple syrup operations use an efficient system of tubes stretching through the forest and draining into one single large collection container, Camphill Village still employs the traditional hands-on approach to tapping our sugar maples.
If you visit us during maple season, you’ll be delighted to see every pathway and patch of forest adorned with glistening aluminum buckets. Each sugar maple on our property receives a drilled hole into which we insert the tap before hanging one of the 13-quart buckets unattended to collect the sap until we return to that tree.
You may think 13 quarts produces a lot of syrup, but that’s not the case. In fact, there’s a 40 to 1 sap to syrup ratio! We’re lucky to be able to boil the hundreds of gallons of sap that we collect in our own sugarhouse.
We load firewood into our cast iron woodstove, and boil the syrup all day until it’s ready to bottle.
So if you’re in the Village in early spring and you catch a glimpse of smoke billowing out of the sugarhouse, stop in for a fresh sample of one of our most celebrated traditions. You can also order our organic Maple Syrup online HERE.