THUNDER BAY – FOOD NOW – Our friends at Foodland Ontario are sharing some tasty news on Maple Syrup.
Richard Bering, Sugar Maker, White Meadows Farms, Niagara says, “Traditionally, we start making maple syrup in the middle of February, depending on when it starts to warm up, and normally it goes to the end of March here in Niagara”.
“To collect sap, we need warm days and cool nights. As the spring gets closer, when it gets warm out, the sap travels up into the tops of the trees to supply the buds with the sugar that they need to produce leaves, and that’s the perfect time for us to drill that small hole into the tree, and during that travel of sap up and down the tree is when we actually collect the sap. It actually takes 40 litres of sap to make one litre of syrup. We have 5000 trees and each tree will produce, on average, 1 L of syrup. So the amount of sap that we actually have to collect is in the hundreds of thousands of litres of sap to create the product that we offer for sale.”
Fort William First Nation Maple Syrup
