Wildwood Ranch

Homeschool field trip!

It's spring (well, sort of).

Time for maple syrup.

 Here is Wildwood's Sugar Shack.
As far as shacks go, it's pretty cute.

So I wasn't prepared for what I saw today at Wildwood.

All I knew about maple syrup up to this point was: bags or buckets on trees.
The sap drips into the bucket.
The bucket is emptied into a giant silver thing that boils it down into syrup.
The end.

But guess what: there is another way.
Vacuuming!

Yes. The sap is vacuum suctioned from trees. Hence all the tubing. No, the trees are not hurt by this. And no, the sap taken out does not stunt their growth. The sap that is taken from trees is so little compared to the amount of sap that the tree actually produces that the tree doesn't mind.
If it did mind, we'd all be using Aunt Jemima on our Saturday morning pancakes.

Once upon a time, the tubing was strategically placed to run so that gravity would help to pull it along the tubes and to it's destination.

But now, the tubes don't have to necessarily run lower. There is another tiny shack we'll meet soon that helps provide the energy to vacuum.

 But the sap lines do run everywhere. So, be careful.

A low sap line.

And a high sap line.

Svea examines a tree closely to find last year's holes from tapping.

And Viggo helps himself to some sap.
Just kidding! (The only sap stealers are squirrels, who chew on the tubing.)
We did get to taste it, though.
It tastes like hummingbird sugar water, only much less sugary . . . and a lot more watery.

So there aren't really buds on trees or green anywhere except for the occasional happy pines.

For all you snow and winter naysayers, you ought to know that lack of snow and warmer weather over the winter equals less sap that trees produce. Consequently this year, Wildwood Ranch produced a fraction of maple syrup of what is normally made.

I think that those that grumble and gripe about winter should miss out on their allotted maple syrup ration this year . . .

. . . if there was one.

 So here's the place where all the suction is produced.

Apparently, they're getting a new one next year.
So observe while you can.

Meanwhile, back at the Sugar Shack . . .

We were shown how the, ah, big silver contraption works.

Last year I was also on a tour of a sugar shack.
And I was in a group of talkative parents and we all missed what this gigantic boiler thing was called.
This year, it was the same story.
Maybe by next year I'll have learned my lesson.

Kids are all over the place in this photo and they're not even mine, and you can't even see what's going on.

The only reason I'm including it is that there is a clock on the wall that looks like a bobber and that qualifies this photo as worthy.

 Elin stands in front of a filter; yet another step the boiled down sap goes through to become the syrup on our pancakes.

 Why all the different colors? Well, tapping started on the trees about a month ago. The first batch had a darker amber color after it was boiled down. And as you can see, as the tapping went on, the finished batches became lighter and then eventually darkened again.

While Wildwood Ranch keeps their batches separate, some maple syrup producers mix all their batches together to create a uniform color.

God's symmetry in nature never ceases to amaze me. Even maple syrup is given an ordered spectrum.

There was even maple sugar to eat, in cute little maple leaf shapes. I would have taken a picture of it, because it was very reminiscent of what Laura Ingalls Wilder would have eaten, but it was eaten quickly - and if you've ever read the Little House series, my kids ate their maple sugar much, much more quickly than Laura Ingalls ever did.

In other news:

This morning we had snow.

There was more than this, but you get the general idea.

And tonight, our deck was looking very different: no snow, and a new picnic table (:

Thank you, honey!