McHenry County News FRE
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Volume 7 Issue 12
March 16, 2017
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The Festival of the Sugar Maples is a tasty event By Anne Eickstadt REPORTER
The McHenry County Conservation District has been around for 45 years. The Coral Woods Conservation Area is one of 35 sites which are open to the public to enjoy nature in McHenry County. Each spring the Conservation District opens Coral Woods for the Festival of the Sugar Maples. Coral Woods has one of the areas few remaining virgin sugar maple groves. The half mile trek through the grove has several stops where the history of maple syrup and the process of acquiring sap and turning it into syrup is explained. At the first stop, a couple of metis, people of French and Native American blood, tell the Iroquois legend of how maple syrup was discovered. An Iroquois legend tells of Woksis, a tribal chief, who was ready to leave on a hunt when his wife asked him to bring water home as well. Woksis took a ‘makuk’, a birch bark vessel with him. When he reached the place he would be meeting the rest of the hunting party, he placed the makuk by a tree. He waited and waited. At one point he idly hurled his tomahawk at the tree. Eventually the rest of the hunters showed up and Woksis retrieved his tomahawk and went hunting, leaving the makuk on the ground. The weather was warm and the gash dripped sap into a bark vessel under the tree. The chief’s wife needed to gather firewood to cook dinner and went out into the woods. She saw the makuk by the tree, filled with ‘water’ and took it home to prepare the evening meal. The sweet aroma of her cooking wafted across the entire village. When the chief neared home, he smelled the odor of the sweet syrup, and when he ate his meal he
ANNE EICKSTADT PHOTOS McHenry County News
4-year-old Braelynn Chesire tries a carrying yoke to carry sap from the trees to the camp.
found the meat to be especially tasty. The Native Americans discovered that they could reduce the sap to a syrup by placing hot stones into the sap to heat it enough to evaporate the water from it. Hot stones needed to be placed into the sap all day and night to get the desired results. They also found that if they overboiled the sap, they could get an easily transportable maple sugar candy
from it. When Europeans came to this country, they brought steel with them which made getting the maple sap and evaporating it into syrup much easier. Sugar maples have the sweetest sap although red maples, silver maples, and boxelder trees can also be tapped for their sweet sap in the spring. Spring is the only time of
Randy Edwards with his feather sunshade, and Lorri Kunz portray French/Native American ‘metis’.
year when sap will be sweet and be easy to acquire. The tree sap sinks down towards the trees roots during the winter so that it does not freeze and split the tree branches and twigs. The warming temperatures in the early spring cause the sap to begin to rise up towards the tree branches to bring the tree back to life after being dormant all winter. The best time to tap the
trees is when the temperature is below freezing at night and rises to above 40 degrees during the day. The sap will rise and fall as the temperatures change. At this time of year, the trees still do not have any leaves so you need to know how to identify them by their other attributes. Sugar maple trees have grayish bark, their branches are opposing (opposite each other) rather than alternating, and the tips of the twigs have sharp reddish buds. (At Coral Woods, you can do it the easy way and look for the leaf painted on each sugar maple.) To tap a tree, first look for a tree that is at least one foot in diameter. Anything smaller than that is still growing and needs all its sap the same way an adult human can donate blood but a child is prohibited from doing so. Then drill a small hole into the tree the size of the tap or ‘spile’ that you will be using. Make a hole precisely two inches into the tree to procure sap. You do not want to drill into the hardwood of the tree because there is not sap there. Drill at a slight upwards angle so the sap will easily flow. Spray the area with bleach water to prevent bacteria and tap the spile into place with a hammer to secure it into the tree. Hang a covered bucket or a plastic jug with a hole drilled into it on the spile to collect the sap. One year, the Conservation District tried using plastic collecting bags for this part of the operation. They found a bit of an issue with the wildlife who also enjoy the sweet sap of the sugar maple trees. The animals chewed holes in the bags to get to the sap. The Conservation District has gone back to sturdier collecting equipment.
See SUGAR MAPLES, Page 2
Ben Ogren demonstrates the proper technique to drill a hole to tap the sugar maple sap.