The Sap is Running

And so were we to the SUGAR BUSH! Saturday we went to Stanley's Olde Maple Lane Farm for a good old fashioned sugar bush. The best, best part of a sugar bush is the all-you-can eat pancakes and french toast and waffles and sausage and bacon with the best tasting maple syrup one has ever had. In fact, it was all so good, it didn't even occur to me to get out my camera and take a picture. My focus was the food!

The bucket is nearly full of sap. It pretty much looks like water when it comes out of the tree and tastes like it, too. It's just a little sweet. Not nearly as sweet as the maple taffy Clayton is enjoying in this picture. (He s-a-v-o-r-e-d his maple taffy for over three hours that day.) It takes 40 liters of sap to make 1, yes, 1 liter of syrup. And that is why real maple syrup costs so much.

After the sap is collected, it goes to the sugar shack where it is boiled and boiled and boiled until it is the wonderful liquid we all love: maple syrup. On this farm, the sugar shack was truly a shack. I've been to another farm where it was actually a really nice building...


This is just one of the vats where the sap is boiled down. There were a couple of stations and none of them really had sap in them. They just had water for demo purposes. The real maple farm (where all of the syrup we consumed came from) is in Lanark County, the maple capital of Ontario, so everything we saw was just for show...

...which didn't stop us from enjoying ourselves. Clayton is still enjoying his maple taffy.

The weather was gorgeous and warm on Saturday, so we took a ride around the farm. It was nice and relaxing. Actually, the weather was not at all cooperative for the maple season. Freezing nights and just above freezing days are the ideal temperatures for the sap to run. We've had really warm days and not quite freezing nights, so the trees are starting to bud. Fabulous for the rest of us. Not so fabulous for the maple farmers. Once the buds open, the sap turns bitter and can no longer be boiled down into syrup.
It was a great day, enjoying a truly Canadian tradition- so fitting as we're in our last month in Ottawa.