Tapping Into A Sweet Spring

Mmmm good! Three year old Justin McLaren of South River digs into fresh maple taffy poured on the snow outside the Long's sugar shack southeast of Trout Creek on Saturday.


Nearly 100 maple syrup lovers of all ages took advantage of the sunny and mild Saturday afternoon to converge on the Long’s Sugar Bush southwest of Trout Creek for an official maple tree tapping ceremony.

Sugar bush owner, John Long – the third generation of Longs to run the family maple syrup business - says the annual event kicks off the season for the Ontario Maple Syrup Producers Association. A different sugar bush owner in the area will host the event each year. Long says weather like this weekend’s is nearly ideal to get the sap moving.

“Plus five or six in the daytime, minus five or six at night and then every once in a while to get a break up, a little rain a little snow to break things up and then it’ll run all over again.” Long said.

The afternoon started with a loggers’ sports show featuring several sawing demonstrations, axe throwing competitions and a log chopping contest, which all drew appreciative applause from the visitors gathered on the hill to the sugar shack.

After the show it was up the hill to the tree tapping ceremony where Trout Creek Parish priest Father Adolphus Chukwuka and renowned Dokis weather forecaster, Gord Restoule, drilled the ceremonial first holes. Father Adolphus said tapping the maple tree reminded him of his father tapping raffia palm trees for palm wine in his homeland of Nigeria. Restoule said it was good to see all the children at the event. He motioned to the trees and said, “Look around. This is all yours.”

Sap started dripping from the taps – also known as spiles - almost immediately. Children eagerly collected drops on their fingers and tasted it. “That’s good,” one said.

After the ceremony, maple taffy was poured onto a snow covered table for the children to sample using popsicle sticks. There was maple cotton candy, maple flavoured tea and coffee and maple muffins prepared by Long’s wife Jo-Ann. And for those looking for something a little more substantial there was a charity barbeque put on by the Trout Creek Agricultural Society.

Long will have all 11,000 trees on his 200 acre sugar bush tapped by Tuesday. About 6,000 are already done. Instead of the old traditional collection method of dripping into metal buckets, sap will leave the trees and with gravity, travel along thousands of metres of translucent blue, plastic piping back to the evaporator house. The average tree produces about a litre of syrup per tap. As it’s collected it will be boiled down in a new stainless steel, high pressure steam boiler Long recently purchased.

“We’ll be running steam coils through these pans and at high pressure they generate about 335 degrees Fahrenheight and that will boil our sap. It keeps us away from burning syrup or running into any difficulties that way.” he said.

Long says it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. Four grades of syrup - extra light, light, medium and amber - are made over the season which lasts about 3 to 6 weeks. This year’s season has started early.

“If we’re boiling by the 15th or 20th of March that’s sort of a good average time start and we’ll often boil until the 15th or 20th of April. But to be starting now, this is only the 11th of March and it looks like it’s running good today... yeah it should be a good season.”