Someone phoned the newspaper office today and gave us a tip that the Amish are making maple syrup. If you've never watched it done, it's worth a drive out into the Amish community to try and catch them in the act.Making maple syrup is a laborious chore. The Amish do it outdoors over an open flame in large vats. I've done it on the kitchen stove. My problem was the cooking. I boiled my sap down so low it ended up being maple candy rather than maple syrup. It was still pretty tasty though.
Tapping maple trees for several days in a row during the late winter and early spring will yield plenty of sap. A mature tree will produce well over a gallon of sap per day.
It takes a keg of sap from a maple tree to make a tablespoon of syrup (literally) and the way energy prices are today, cooking down 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup is costly.
Read more about our inability to meet global demand for maple syrup here on the Rural Journalism Blog. Or take a springtime drive to the Amish community in Crittenden County and watch it being done the old-fashioned way outdoors.
