Village Squire, 1976-04, Page 20The rites of spring --
sweet taste
of life in Canada
Of the foods and delicacies :enjoyed by
Canadians, none could be more Canadian that
the elix( of spring: maple syrup.
The ritual of syrup time is older that the
settlement of the country. For hundreds of
years the Indians and later whites have had
the sweet nectar of nature as the first bonus
of living through another hard Canadian
winter. North American Indians discovered
the sweet secret of the maples sometime
before recorded history. They found that not
only did it provide a delicious spring
sweetener, but it had medicinal purposes.
Scurvy was the scourge of early life for the
Indians and later the early pioneers. In the
hard Canadian winters Vitamin C was hard to
come by. Maple Syrup provided the valuable
vitamins.
Indians used hollowed out wooden
branches as spites to take the sap from the
trees, dug -out logs as containers to capture
the sap and boiled the sap to strengthen the
sweetness.
• Early explorers and settlers copied and
adapted the Indian methods of harvesting the
sap and boiling it down to make an
ac, r� 1..iB�. t
inewensive, substitute for cane sugar.
Inexpensive is hardly the word for maply
syrup of sugar any more. The going price of
syrup this season seems to be about $13 a
gallon. All things are relative, of course and
when one looks at the amount of work
involved in gathering sap and boiling down 40
gallons to make one gallon of syrup, one
begins to realize that the syrup is indeed
precious and worth almost any price. There
are many attempts to artificially imitate the
true maply syrup but none come close.
Farmers in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick produce about 1.5 million
gallons of syrup. The heaviest production, 85
per cent of Canadian supplies, is concentrat-
ed in Quebec, most in the Eastern Townships
between the St. Lawrence River and the U.S.
border. There, large commercial bushes have
up to 20,000 trees on tap.
The traditional scenes we've all seen in
sketches and paintings shows the pails on the
sides of the trees, the sap drip, drip, dripping
from a metal spile to fill the sap bucket. Then
there's the team and sleigh complete with
huge barrel into which the pails are emptied
before being taken to the evaporator where
the sap is boiled down. You'll still see that,
particularly here in western Ontario when
many farmers dabble in syrup but few go into
it in a big way. But with the farmers serious
about making some money in the maple syrup
business, the traditional picture has changed.
The old way was picturesque but pretty
backbreaking. In an effort to cut down on
labour, plastic pipelines are now used to link
tree to tree and lead all the way to a central
container or to the evaporator storage tank. It
means one man can handle far more trees
than in the past.
The job of boiling the sap down has
changed too as more and more advanced
evaporator units are developed. So the
modern sugar bush may bear little
resemblance to the bush of our dreams.
The expedition to the sugar bush has
become more and more popular in recent
years. Conservation Authorities, historical
boards and just ordinary farmers have been
organizing public displays of sugar making.
After several years of decline, the number of
farmers tapping their trees seems to be
increasing again and more are welcoming
visitors.
And of course the maple syrup festival has
become a big part of spring. The most famous
festival of course is the Elmira festival that
draws thousands of visitors each spring, not
only to taste the syrup and pancakes and visit
the sugar bushes, but to buy the beautiful
hand-crafted goods of the local Mennonite
ladies.
Closer to home, smaller, but with a
building reputation is the Belmore Maple
Syrup Festival which will be held in the little
north Huron village on April 17 this year
There have been mixed results in the syrup
business the last few springs. Ideal weather
calls for cold frosty nights followed by sunny
days with the temperature climbing to 5-10
degrees Celcius (40-50° FJ. Springs in recent
years have tended to come in with a rush and
the syrup season which at best can last for six
weeks, can be over in a matter of days. This
season has been a bewildering one with some
operators saying there would have been a run
of sap in February if they had thought to sap
the trees. By late March, the traditional
tapping season, there wasn't even any -snow
in many bushes. The weather was so
Hidden among the maple trees the rough wooden sided sugar shacks have their big chance every spring. For
a few weeks they become a beehive of activity producing something just as sweet as a real beehive.
11111, VILLAGE SQUIRE/APRIL 1976