Last weekend was our annual Family and Friends Day at OurSugarBush.  Lots and lots of visitors enjoyed our little piece of maple goodness in OurSugarBush and we filled lots of bellies with pancakes and fresh maple syrup.  I even heard one young fella named Rayj claim “those were the best pancakes I ever had!”  Wow, now that’s a great compliment.  Someone else asked what the secret to our delicious pancakes is.  I simply told them the secret is the log cabin and my griddle.  Two of my most favourite things at OurSugarBush!

We’ve been busy boiling sap every day this week long into the evening hours.  Chris runs the evaporator and keeps it stoked full of wood making the very finest, sweetest, maple syrup ever!  I work more on the processing sap side of the operation.  The sap is collected and stored in stainless steel tanks until I’m ready to process it through the reverse osmosis machine which removes 75% of the water from the sap before it is boiled.   At the end of each night, the machines are cleaned, tanks and pails are washed, and so is the floor so we’re ready to do it all over again the next day.  We continue to hope for good maple weather, +5°C in the day and -5°C at night.

I was invited to speak to Mrs. Dunn’s grade 2 class at Westfield Public School in Tillsonburg on Wednesday about how we make maple syrup.   Pretending and imagination were the key ingredients of the class in the fun half hour I spent with them.  There were eager volunteers to be trees and other volunteers to drill holes, tap in the spiles and hang the buckets on those tree volunteers.  We also had more tree volunteers with a pipeline to collect our pretend sap.  Other volunteers made wood logs and crumpled red and yellow tissue paper to build the pretend fire where we cooked our pretend sap into REAL maple syrup.  The kids were eager learners and were very keen to taste the sap, maple syrup and maple butter.  I hope they enjoyed our pretend tree tapping as much as I did!

Check out the banner hung on the side of the old bakery in Straffordville.  It’s our advertising sign for www.MapleWeekend.ca.  You are invited to join us at OurSugarBush on the first weekend of April to see first-hand how we make maple syrup.  We hope to have a few activities for you to learn about maple syrup and enjoy the maple goodness!  Of course, there will be pancakes and lots of maple syrup for you to enjoy.  Bring your family and join us April 6 and 7 starting at 10 am until 4 pm.

I haven’t heard the frog peepers croaking yet so our maple season is not over yet!

I ♥ maple!

Wendy