Maple Syrup Madness

As usual, I have been very busy this month. First of all, I started a new typing program it is called Mavis Beacon Typing. We also went to the Genesee Country Village Museum, and we went skiing at Holiday Halley. Later this month, we are going to Gettysburg and to Washington DC.

I am doing a new typing program called Mavis Beacon. The program is teaching me to type better. The other typing program that we were using before did not help me learn to type. It is important that I learn to type so that I can write essays when I get to college.

On Friday of this week, we went to the Genesee Country Village Museum to attend a homeschooling day called Maple Madness. I was happy we were able to go because there was a huge blizzard a few days before our field trip, and I was concerned that the trip would be cancelled. At our house, fifteen inches of snow fell in twelve hours. At the GCVM they taught us about the history of collecting sap and making maple syrup.  The first thing we saw the Cooper Smith. The Cooper Smith makes wooden barrels to hold the sap. The barrels were made out of wood, and were put together like a puzzle and held together with a metal band. The Cooper Smith taught us all the parts of wooden barrels and how they used to be made.

               After the Cooper Smith demonstration, we learned how to make 1-2-3-4 cake. We got to try a sample of the cake too. It is called 1-2-3-4 cake because the recipe is 1 cup of butter, 2 cups of sugar, 3 cups of flour and 4 eggs, all mixed together. The frosting was made out of maple syrup.

               We then went over to our pancake lunch. Before lunch, we learned a line dance called The Boston Tea party.  There was a young woman who played the fiddle for our dance, and we learned the steps. Sam had a difficult time following the dance, and unfortunately he was my partner! We ate chocolate pancakes and sausage, with real maple syrup, for lunch. After lunch, we went to see the modern sap/syrup evaporator. A man told us that in the late fall, water goes down from the branches to the roots of the tree. That is so the water doesn’t freeze inside the tree and crack the tree. In the early springtime, the sweet water (sap) goes up from the roots and travels to the branches. The tap is drilled into the tree only into the first layer because the sap is only in the first two layers of the tree. The middle of the tree is hardwood. We learned how to identify a maple tree. In the early springtime, the best way to identify a maple tree is to look at the branches. Unlike other trees that alternate branch sprigs, the maple tree has branches that are directly across from each other, like arms. When there are leaves on the tree, it is easy to tell a maple tree from other trees. Maple trees only grow in Northern states in the USA. All maple syrup in the world comes from our area of the country.

Then we walked on the nature trail to see the other maple syrup stations. The nature trail demonstrations were set up so that as we walked the trail, we would go back in time and see how syrup was produced in the early 1800’s.  At one station, we got to drill a hole in a Maple tree with an old- fashioned hand drill and put in the spile. The spile is the name of the tap. First, the tree has to be measured so that the number of taps can be determined. The farmers use a rope with tape markings on it. If the rope goes around the tree and meets the first tape, then the tree is forty years old and can have one sap tap. If the rope meets at the marking with two pieces of tape, then the tree is eighty years old and can have two taps. We saw a tree that was 120 years old and had three taps. The taps used today are metal, and the sap runs through plastic tubing down to the collection bucket. Pails are no longer hung from the trees because they get knocked off or bark and dirt get inside the sap.

 The next stop was a man with a long mustache who talked about the science of making syrup. He showed us how to measure how much sugar is in the sap using a hydrometer. The hydrometer is glass and it had a weight inside. It measures the density of the water/sap. In plain water, the hydrometer sunk to the bottom of the pail, but the higher it floated showed the higher amount of sugar in the sap.

 We also went to see a sugar camp. In the 1800’s, a family would live at the small sugar camp for two to four weeks to collect the sap and boil it down into syrup. After boiling and boiling and boiling the syrup, the syrup would eventually turn into a brown sugar rock. The sugar was easier to transport than syrup, and they could always add water back in to recreate syrup if they needed syrup. The Native Americans taught the colonists how to collect and boil down the sap of Maple trees.

At the Nature Center, we got to eat sugar on snow. Maple syrup is heated to over 200 degrees, and then a little bit is poured on snow. The cold snow makes the syrup harden quickly into a candy. At the Nature Center, we saw many animal skulls and skeletons. That wasn’t part of the Maple Sugar day, but we spent time looking at them too. There was a Bison, an Elk, a Moose and a deer mounted on the wall. I correctly identified a skull of a carnivore. I knew it was a carnivore because the teeth were all sharp and pointed, and there were no flat teeth for chewing plants.

The last stop for the day was at the Tin Smith’s shop. He talked about how to make tin maple syrup buckets. It was getting late, so we had to leave then.  Going to the Genesee Country Village Museum never gets boring to me.