There are good years and bad years for maple syrup and years when you can predict which it will be. But this year leaves the experts perplexed.
”For a large production we need five or six weeks with freezing temperatures during the night and above freezing during the day,” explains Chet Ryndak, director of River Trail Nature Center in Northbrook. This winter, though, we had a long, early warm spell, followed by a cold snap. ”It`s an unusual, sporadic year,” says Ryndak, ”so it`s questionable whether we`re going to get a good run.”
One of the best years at River Trail, he says, was 1989, when 15,000 to 20,000 gallons of sap was gathered to boil down to make syrup. ”Within two Sundays we used it all on pancakes or sold it,” says Ryndak. Good year or bad year, though, there is always enough syrup to go around. ”We always bring in syrup from Wisconsin or Michigan to supplement what we make,” Ryndak says.
The sap taken earliest in the season makes the best syrup because of its high sugar content. Nature, of course, did not intend the sap for human consumption. ”Sap is the food the trees made last year when they had leaves,” explains Laurel Ross, a naturalist with the North Park Village Nature Center. ”They store it in their roots in the winter and when their dormant season is over they use it for energy until their leaves come out.”
The trees have their timing perfected and that determines the length of the maple syrup season. ”Trees are good planners and it`s a matter of about six weeks between the time the sap starts running and the time you have to stop,” says Ross. ”You have to stop tapping once the buds are open because the tree`s metabolism changes and the sap doesn`t taste good after that.”
Since the trees need the sap, Ross says, many visitors wonder whether tapping it hurts them. She explains, however, that only a small percentage of the tree`s sap is removed. ”There are many thousands of gallons per tree,”
she says, ”and for us to take a few gallons is pretty negligible.”
Without certain precautions, however, trees can be used up. Native Americans were the first to tap the maple trees and boil the sap down to syrup. Jude Rakowski, coordinator of the Maple Sugar Festival at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore near Porter, Ind., says that when the Indians tapped trees, they made big slashes all around them. ”I`m sure that in three or four years the tree finally died,” she says, ”but trees were so big and numerous then that it didn`t really matter if a tree died.”
Times have changed, though, and today trees are considered a precious commodity to be carefully preserved. ”We want to save the resource for demonstrations forever,” says Rakowski, ”so we are very careful.” She says that to protect the trees, they are not tapped until they are 12 to 15 inches in diameter. New taps are not made near holes from preceding years until those areas have completely healed, and the tools for tapping must be kept clean to avoid introducing bacteria into the wound.
People should follow these guidelines if they want to tap the trees in their own yard. But while it may seem like a picturesque thing to do, it probably won`t be very productive. ”The ratio is 40 or 50 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup, and a good tap on a good day will give you about one gallon of sap,” explains Ross. ”So you`ll get a tiny amount of syrup and you might end up with your kitchen wallpaper on the floor because of the steam.”
A better way to sample the real thing is to visit a maple syrup festival, where someone else has done the tapping and the boiling.
