HomeMy WebLinkAboutSaluting Huron County's Agricultural Industry, 1987-03-25, Page 8PAGE A8. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 1987.
Ancient tradition brings
pleasure for McKillop family
Nothing is more Canadian than
maple syrup, and maple products
have become one of the most
coveted “Canadian” gifts to take
or send to loved ones in other
countries, since nowhere else on
earth are the sweet products of our
heritage produced, save for the
New England States of the USA.
Maple sugar was the first kind of
sugar produced in North America,
the standard sweetener until about
1875, years after most North Huron
townships were opened for settle
ment by our pioneer forefathers.
When the first Europeans land
ed in North America, they found
that native Indian people were
making a crude, dark sugar by
cutting a slanting gash in the bark
of a maple tree, and catching the
sap from the wound birch bark
containers.
The collected sap was poured
into a hollowed basswood log, then
hot stones were thrown in to
evaporate the water until syrup,
and eventually sugar, was produc
ed.
Production methods have
changed vastly since those early
days, but fresh maple syrup is still
one of the firstsignsofSp ringin
Ontario, where the delicious syrup
is sometimes referred to as “a taste
of our heritage.”
Some of the romance went out of
maple syrup production with the
recent introduction of pipeline
gathering, the method of collecting
the sap at a central location by
stringing thin plastic tubing from
tree to tree. Nevertheless, the new
method has cut back dramatically
on the back-breaking labour once
required to get the sap out of the
often snow-clogged bush and into
the sugar shack. As well, the new
methods are doubtless the reason
that maple syrup is still affordable
to the average Canadian, certainly
as a very special treat each Spring.
Nearly every landowner in
Southern Ontario has at some time
or other tapped his own maple
trees, to make maple syrup by
whatever means he could find. But
now many of the best producers are
members of The Ontario Maple
Syrup Producers’ Association,
most prominently display the
Association’s distinctive logo, and
mos> are open to the public during
‘maple syrup time’ across the
province.
One of these is Winthrop Maple
Syrup, owned and operated by Ray
and Barb Storey at RR 1, Seaforth,
just two miles east of the village of
Winthrop on County Road 17. Ray
Storey cannot remember a time
when he did not go out gathering
sap with his father each spring,
using a team of horses and a sled to
draw the cans of sap to the sugar
shack for boiling.
When Ray and Barb got into the
business seriously in the Spring of
1983, they tapped 200 trees,
producing some 100 gallons of
syrup for the first year. Since then,
the family has steadily added more
taps and better equipment to their
operation, so that this Spring they
have more than 900 taps in 450
trees, producing enough sap to
keep the family operation going up
to 12 hours a day when the weather
conditions are just right to keep the
sap flowing.
It takes 40 gallons of sap to make
one gallon of syrup, a process
which can be almost continual
when the conditions are just right.
The process is totally dependent
upon the weather: sap won’t run
until the temperature is at least
plus three degrees Celsius, runs
best at five to seven degrees, and
dries up if the temperature goes
much above 20 degrees for more
than a few hours.
But other factors enter into sap
Four-year-old John Henry Storey helps his dad. Ray, by stuffing wood into the firebox of the
evaporator at the beginning of another day in the sugar house. The monster furnace consumes
40 cords of wood a season, but the evaporator can produce one gallon of syrup per minute when
running full blast.
flow, such as how cold it was the
night before, or whether it is
snowing or raining. You can’t ever
sayforsurewhenitmightrun,”
Barb Storey says. “It’s queer
stuff. ”
This season is the first the
Storeys have used a pipeline to
gather their sap. Ray estimates he
has nearly one and a half miles of
plastic tubing strung out in his own
and in rented bush, feeding into
large collector tanks right in the
woodlot. Every day, someone must
drive aroundtobringthe sap in,
pumping it directly into plastic
barrels mounted in the pick-up, or
into milk cans on a sled behind the
tractor.
The large stainless steel evapor
ator purchased in 1985, at a cost of
$5,000, will handle up to 400
gallons of sap at a time, reducing it
to syrup at the rate of about one
gallon per hour, as long as a roaring
fire is kept going under it. The
Storeys burn about 40 face cords of
wood a season, getting burnable
material from any source they can
find, including from old building
materials, a by-product of Ray’s
major line of work, Winthrop
Construction.
After the sap has boiled down to
Continued on page A9
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