Our Homeschool Adventure: Maple Sugaring

We went to a Maple Sugar Festival over the week-end. It was very interesting to learn how difficult it is to make maple syrup and maple sugar. It is amazing that the Lenni Lenappe learned how to do this and how the pioneers made improvements to the process.

No one knows for sure how they learned to make maple sugar (and they made sugar because back in the day there were no nice glass bottles to lug your syrup around in) but they did teach us a few stories about it.

1. The legend goes that syrup used to flow from the trees by simply breaking off a branch. One day God came or a visit and found all the people laying under trees and letting the syrup just drip right into their mouths. Upset by how lazy his people had become God made it difficult to get the syrup. You had to really want it.

2. One day big strong hunter man tells his wife that he is going to bring a deer home for dinner and to boil the water. He didn't get a deer. In anger he throws his axe into the tree creating a gash. Next day he tells his wife that he is going to get a deer and to get the water ready. She goes out thinking about how she has to haul her pots down to the river. When she gets to her pots they were filled with water from the gash the axe made. Thrilled that she does not have to go down to the river she starts the fire going. Hubby comes home with a deer and it was the best ever.

3. The Native Americans noticed the squirrels always licking up the sap and this piqued there curiosity.

We learned that it takes a lot of work to get the delicious syrup. First you have to collect the sap. It takes a lot of sap. Then you have to boil the sap. And boil the sap. And boil the sap. And boil the sap. As a Native American this is no easy task. The whole village went into the forest at this time. The women and children did most of the work. Just try to imagine heating rocks all day to put in your wood trough to boil off the water so you can get some sugar.

When the pioneers came they brought metal pots. The process started to become a little easier.

We also learned that only in the Northeast are the conditions appropriate for gathering sap. It has to be below freezing at night and above freezing during the day. There is a small window of time to gather all that sap.

Here is a shot right outside the event.

Inside there were different stations. Here is M learning that the largest tree does not always produce the largest seed.

Here they are trying to guess which of these products come from trees. (Hint: They all do)

Here is a replica of a wig wam that the Native Americans would have used during their time in the forest. Not an exact replica as they would have used bark from the trees not necessarily reeds.