Maple Sap Harvesting Leads To A Taste Of Sweetness

This young lady watches as a drip of sap falls from the tap into the collection bucket. (photo by Candace Allsup)

Oskaloosa, Iowa – The day couldn’t have been more perfect for a day of learning the art of maple syrup making than Saturday. The only complaint may have been the stronger than normal winds, but with the warm spring temps, no one hardly noticed and many residents found their way to Eveland Access and took the ride back into the Sheets addition. The Sheets Addition is a 34 acre forest connected to Eveland Access, south of Oskaloosa along the Des Moines River.

The Native American’s had long collected the xylem sap that is found in native maple trees, such as the red maple and black maple. Before the winter months the trees store a starch in their trunks and roots, that is then converted to a sugar and rises during the spring, and is visible as sap. Actually, the sap flows up the tree during the day, and flows back down in the evening, making collection best at night.

Deciding where to tap a tree takes experience and understanding the tree, such as taking into consideration where the most branches are in relation to the root system, and also tapping facing the south should help produce more sap because of the sunlight hitting the tree.

European settlers greatly refined the process of turning the maple sap into syrup, and both the Native American and modern ways were demonstrated on Saturday.

Mary Rozenboom and her husband Ed were there helping to demonstrate the new way of making syrup. Ed demonstrated the modern way that syrup is reduced. The couple bottles the syrup and most times give their work away as gifts to those they know.

Posted by on Mar 11 2012. Filed under Local News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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